


Scraps From The Cutting Room Floor.

by Jackmerlin



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 08:03:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11054757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackmerlin/pseuds/Jackmerlin
Summary: A collection of stories following on from 'Scenes From An Unlikely Tale' -Nicola has children.Nicola and Patrick's friendship later in life.Lawrie's relationship(s).Includes a story suggested by AF's reported prediction for Ann's future.





	1. Our Lover's Story.

Nicola perched on the edge of the bed, eyeing the thin foil-backed packet in her hand. Only one of the tiny blisters was left still containing a pill. It was Friday, which meant not getting a doctor’s appointment until at least the middle of next week, because Mondays were always impossible. She had been meaning to arrange an visit to get her next six month’s worth of prescription, for at least a fortnight. Some days she had been too busy to get around to it; other days it had simply gone out of her head. But there had also been days when she hadn’t forgotten and she _would_ have had time….  
A door banged downstairs. Philip back earlier than expected from the studio, which meant that things had probably gone well.  
He called for her, bounding up the stairs two at a time, and she said, “I’m in here.”  
“What are you doing?“ he asked, seeing her uncharacteristically idle. She supposed there was no time like the present, especially as she knew he had been willing for some time and was only waiting for her. Waiting imperceptibly and patiently, but still, waiting.  
“I’ve run out of these.”  
“Oh,” he said, casually, not getting it. “Well, I can always wear a hat."  
“No. That’s not what I meant.”  
“No?”  
“I could - stop. Taking them at all.”  
“Really?” He gazed at her for a long moment. “Are you sure?”  
“Yes.”  
“Oh. _Good._ ” Looking bright-eyed. “ Can we start now?”  
“No, it takes weeks to get out of the system.”  
“Still, we could get some practice in …”  
She laughed as he reached for her. “Are you really sure about it too? If we have a baby we won’t be able to just do anything - this, you know - whenever.”  
“All the more reason to make the most of it now…”  
She hesitated. She was sure she’d been about to do something, before she’d got distracted and ended up brooding on the bed. Being broody of all things, she thought, smiling internally.  
“Shall I stop?” he asked, very innocent, pausing where he was with his fingers sliding inside the waistband of her jeans.  
When he was in this sort of happy mood, he could play every inch of her with languorous, exquisite expertise, and she really had to be quite annoyed about something to resist him. Which at this moment she wasn’t.  
“You don’t have to look so pleased with yourself,” she said, as they folded gently down on the bed.  
“Yes, I do,” he said, and proceeded to whisper several flattering but very silly things indeed in her ear. And when he started talking like that, there was only one way to shut him up; she reached for the button of his flies and took matters into her own hands.

 

XXXXX

 

 

Nicola sat in the doctors’ waiting room, surrounded by the warm fug of everyone’s steaming raincoats. She felt stickily hot in her own coat, the gently curving dome of her belly radiating internal heat like her own personal oven. It seemed that appointments were running late as usual, her own time had been and gone.  
Sighing she picked up a newspaper left on the seat beside her. It was one of the grottier tabloids and she flicked the pages restlessly, seeing nothing of interest. She almost missed it entirely, several pages in, a photo, a short paragraph and a lurid headline. ‘My three-in-a-bed romp with Philip Scott.’  
‘Glamour model and actress, Tallulah Fox, tells us exclusively about the very special intimate performance she enjoyed with the Ffurnais guitarist, after the indie band visited Manchester on tour. Fellow model Fizzi Bonks was missing out on all the fun in the luxurious suite in the Manchester Hilton, so we invited her to join in too, says Tallulah.’  
A large photo of a pouting and barely clad model, a smaller and blurry photo of Philip flanked by a girl on each side - something vaguely familiar about it- and more words…  
“ _Nicola Scott!_ ” She started as she realised her name had been called twice, and dropping the paper she went into the doctor’s room. She submitted to the usual indignities of a routine pregnancy check, wincing slightly at the needle prick for the blood sample, and the minor embarrassment of handing over the tube of wee. She had to remind herself that this had been her own idea, after all.  
“And how are you keeping generally?” asked the doctor, breezily cheerful, as he took her blood pressure.  
“Oh fine,” said Nicola automatically. “Everything’s fine.”

 

She walked home slowly, rather enjoying the light September rain after the over-heated surgery. The band were away at a festival in Germany, and there were a couple of hours before Philip was likely to phone; sometime between the sound-check and the performance usually.  
She had only just let herself in, put the kettle on and peeled off her wet top layer, when there was a knock on the door. Robyn, and Seren, in her new school uniform.  
“Can she come in and see the kittens again?” asked Robyn.  
“Only two left now,” Nicola told her.  
“Mum. _Please_ ,” whined Seren, clearly continuing an argument that had been going on for some time.  
“If you can stop nagging for five minutes, I will think about it,” said Robyn, exasperated.  
This was the closest Seren had got to a ‘yes’ and not wanting to spoil her chances, she disappeared silently into the utility room behind the kitchen where the kittens lived.  
“I really don’t want a cat,” sighed Robyn.  
“Neither did we,” replied Nicola. The little grey stray had appeared in their garden and decided that this would suit her very nicely, thank you. The kittens were a surprise too.  
Nicola made tea, while Robyn made a few passing comments about Seren’s first week at school. Seren had led rather a wandering life up till that September, travelling everywhere on tour with the band, but she and Robyn were now reluctantly stuck at home during term-time. ‘I could have home-schooled her,’ Robyn had said wistfully, ‘but she does need some friends her own age.’ Nicola had to agree: Seren was a nice enough kid most of the time, but she was definitely developing some of the mannerisms of a child who spends too much time with adults.  
Tea made, and plonked down on the kitchen table, Robyn finally got round to it. “Um, Nick? Have you seen the Sun today?”  
“As it happens, _yes_. It was in the doctor’s waiting room.”  
“Oh. Did you see - what they wrote?”  
Nicola nodded. “The one day I happen to look at the bloody thing. What are the chances?”  
“You know - you know it’s not true?”  
“Of _course_ I know it’s not true!” snapped Nicola, far more fiercely than she’d intended.  
“Don’t bite _my_ head off. I don’t mean ‘do you trust him?’ I mean, you know it _couldn’t_ be true, physically. Or logistically.”  
Nicola looked at her.  
“They say it was after the Manchester gig, they mention it at least twice. But _that_ night, Dai and I were going out - for my birthday. And that girl who was babysitting Seren didn’t want to stay any later, so Phil said he’d stay with her.”  
Nicola digested this. “Was that the night she woke up and wouldn’t go back to sleep and he had to read her ‘Charlotte’s Web’ half the night?”  
“He mentioned that?”  
“I wouldn’t have known where it was though,” Nicola pointed out. Philip rarely paid much attention himself to where he was and when.  
With a child’s ability to be drawn by the sound of someone talking about them, Seren had returned silently to the kitchen, with a small, grey kitten clasped against her chest. “I want this one,” she said hopefully.  
“Oh, yes, alright,” said Robyn, distractedly.  
In an ecstasy of disbelieving joy, Seren sank to the kitchen floor, allowing the kitten to climb up onto her shoulder. It pawed at her mop of black curls with a tiny, curious paw.  
“Have you looked properly at the photo they used?” asked Robyn. “You were at the party they took it at.”  
“I was?”  
Robyn hauled a crumpled copy of the paper out of her bag. “Look. You can see part of me in the background. It was that record company bash at Christmas. They had loads of glamorous wannabe types there, pushing themselves into photos with everyone. I’m sure Dai was in this one too, only they’ve cut him out.”  
They bent over the picture, inspecting closely. One of the grinning girls had a stray arm next to her, with no person attached. Philip, between the girls, looked distinctly unenchanted.  
“It’s horrible,” said Nicola. “I don’t even see why, it’s not enough of a story."  
“I expect the silly bitch was sleeping with the journalist in return for some free publicity. Or blackmailing him,” said Robyn wisely. “They just had to find someone they already had a picture of her with, and then make the rest up. And wait for a slow news day. You can tell the paper thinks it’s nothing, it supposedly happened weeks ago.”  
Nicola felt disgusted; it was like having trod in dog muck and not being able to get the smell off one’s shoe. The lie itself was bad enough, but the random pointlessness of it ……… it was so anonymously _nasty_ …  
“Nick?” asked Robyn, suddenly concerned. For a horrible moment Nicola had thought she might burst into tears. Kindly people had warned her that being pregnant could make you go a bit daft about things; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might affect _her_ that way.  
“He said not to tell anyone,” remarked Seren suddenly. She looked up, aware of Robyn and Nicola’s startled attention.  
“Charlotte dies,” she said, following the only bit of conversation she’d been interested in. “Philip was crying at the end. He told me not to tell anyone.”  
“Well, you just have, haven’t you?” said Robyn severely.  
“He tried to pretend he wasn’t really,” said Seren, unabashed. “But I could see there was wet on his eyes.”  
“I expect he was actually,” agreed Nicola, and all at once found that she was feeling considerably better.

 

XXXXX

 

Philip rubbed the baby’s back soothingly, until a milky burp erupted over his shoulder. He had last done that for his baby brothers (now both strapping great lumps, away at university), and he was secretly rather pleased that he hadn’t lost the knack.  
“We can put them off, if you like,” he said. “They don’t have to come today.”  
“No, it’s alright. It’s only fair after we had my lot mobbing the place all weekend,” said Nicola.  
Philip rearranged his son in his arms so that his head was on a non-burpy part of his jumper. A pair of very clear blue eyes gazed searchingly up at him. “You should stay there for a bit,” he suggested, looking over to meet just the same eyes in the tired, pale face on the pillow.  
“I’m _fine_ ,” said Nicola, as he’d known she would.  
“And you’ll be even more fine if you have a couple of hours sleep,” he said. “Besides, I have to explain a few things to young Alexander here, before he meets his Grandad for the first time.”  
“Like what?” she said. He was pleased to see her giving in and sinking further into the pillow.  
“Like how _not_ to grow up to be a long-haired drop-out.”  
“He doesn’t still think that!”  
“He thinks I started to show a glimmer of sense when I married you,” remarked Philip. “Unlike _your_ lot, who just wonder what on earth you were thinking of?”  
“That’s not entirely true…” she said, sleepily.  
The baby’s eyes blinked slowly, closed experimentally, then opened again. “We’re going to go and listen to some music,” Philip told him. “What do you think? Can‘t go wrong with the Kinks. Or some Bowie, maybe. You could even listen to _Mummy‘s_ record.”  
One pair of blue eyes had already closed as he trod softly out of the room. The other pair closed too as he stepped gently downstairs, unable to resist the lulling rhythm against his chest.


	2. Finding Tranquility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is something of an experimental offering, having travelled a long way from canon. This is set about ten years after my Nicola and Philip story ended, so getting into the very late eighties on that timescale.  
> The Merricks must have had a farm manager but I can't find any name for one in canon, so I have invented the name Widdicombe.

Patrick lay propped on his pillow, sleepily watching Anoush dress for work. Stripped naked, he was beautiful as a thoroughbred racehorse is beautiful: long, athletic limbs sliding under rippling skin. Patrick admired as Anoush lifted his arms to pull his shirt over his head, revealing all the ribs and muscles of his long, lean torso. Watching was a drowsy pleasure now, six hours earlier he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off him.  
There wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on that flat stomach, currently being concealed behind shirt and belted trousers. Patrick was sheepishly aware that he himself was becoming rather soft around the edges, especially since he had given up spending long weekends hunting or hawking over the Merrick land. Perhaps he should ask Anoush if he could go running with him; but he sensed that Anoush ran alone, not for the sake of fitness, but to escape the memory of the ghosts that followed him.  
Not that Patrick didn’t have his own angry ghosts. They waited for him at home, row upon row of them, crowding behind each other to look accusingly down at him through the mullioned windows of Mariot Chase.

 

XXX

 

The branch of the Civil Service in which Patrick worked had an account with a rather superior cab company. The cars were sleek, with leather upholstery, the chauffeurs smartly uniformed. The account was intended for work-related transport only, but in practice, a blind eye was turned to people occasionally using the cabs for their own purposes. Patrick, scrupulously honest, always paid for himself on the rare occasions that he used a cab for personal reasons. Usually he travelled round London on foot or by bus, but if he worked late on a particularly foul night he might just call a cab to get home.  
On one fateful summer’s day Patrick was sent across London for a meeting, and Anoush was driving. Almost stationary in grid-locked traffic, conversation, however awkward, became inevitable.  
Anoush asked if ‘Sir would like to have the cricket on the car radio?’ (Many of his passengers did, especially from Patrick’s office.) Patrick was seized with a ridiculous sense of dismay that he had never asked Nicola to explain cricket to him, just so that he could have been able to carry on a conversation with this beautiful dark-eyed young man. (No younger than he was himself, as he later found out.)  
“Not for me,” he said, regretfully, but recognising that the suggestion might have been a hint, added, “But do put it on if you want it - I don’t mind.”  
“No, Sir, I don’t follow it myself.”  
He had perfect but accented English, and Patrick asked where he came from. Iraq he said, but he had been in England for some years. Patrick, like a fool, started prattling on about what he knew of Iraq, which was mostly the history of two thousand and more years ago. Anoush listened with impeccable, if slightly bemused courtesy.  
After that, by chance or coincidence, Patrick was driven by Anoush several times in succession. He managed to make perfectly ordinary small talk the next time. He found that he was hoping that whenever he had to go anywhere it would be Anoush at the wheel, and making excuses as to why he really needed to call a cab to get home, even on pleasant, balmy evenings, when he could have walked through the parks.  
After working very late one evening, and feeling frustrated by what he recognised was going to become another hopeless period of unrequited longing, he asked Anoush to drive him to a certain club. It was a place he went to rarely, but felt compulsively drawn to from time to time.  
Anoush pulled up at the kerb, thirty metres or so short of the entrance. “Do you want me to wait for you?” he asked, as Patrick unclipped his seat belt. He never normally asked this. Patrick thought he saw, or maybe imagined, a faint line of doubt shading his eyes.  
“I - I don’t know. What time do you finish?”  
Anoush made a show of flicking up his cuff to look at his wristwatch. Then he shrugged, “Now.”  
Patrick, who had been fumbling for his wallet, left it and settled back in the seat. “We could go for a drink, if you like?” His heart was thundering dangerously.  
“I don’t drink,” said Anoush, steadily. It didn’t seem to be a refusal.  
“Um, a coffee then? We could go back to mine.”  
Anoush started the car, Patrick clipped his seat belt back on. He realised giddily, that of course Anoush already knew the way. One of the things that fascinated him was watching Anoush drive, his long fingers supple and strong on the steering wheel. He always knew the way too - to anywhere at all. To Patrick, who had never quite forgiven cars for not being horses, and was by his own admission a hopeless driver, Anoush’s calm mastery was alluring.  
Everything after that was a revelation. Not just that night, but all the nights after.

  
XXX

  
Patrick’s previous sexual collisions had been guilty, embarrassing affairs; grubby liaisons with people that he didn‘t like much to start with, and liked even less once they‘d had anything to do with him. He had desperately hoped that he might learn to resist, that each time would be the ‘one last time’. After too many ‘one last times’ he gave up going to confession, and, on the basis of ‘being hung for a sheep as well as a lamb‘, started visiting the sort of clubs where he might get picked up. Not often, just when the urge became too compelling to ignore. Sex had been anonymous and instantly gratifying, brutally impersonal. Often painful. Some of those random encounters had been frankly terrifying when he thought back to them in cold blood. But for a long bleak time he had felt cast out into utter darkness and it had seemed perfectly just that sex should feel like punishment.  
With Anoush he suddenly understood at a physical level why people referred to sex as ‘making love‘. He wondered if this was what it was like being in bed with a girl - being able to lie there afterwards still talking and touching.  
Anoush found the scars across his stomach and hips and thighs from all the operations he’d had and asked what they were. He gently kissed his way along the line of each one, while Patrick told him about falling off the cliff, and lying trapped in bed for months not knowing if he would walk again. And Jon.  
Mostly Patrick talked and Anoush listened. When Anoush talked it was stories about work, or things he found curious about living in England. Patrick learned what he never talked about. Home. Family.  
He rarely talked about the casual and almost daily racism he encountered either. Sometimes he turned up at the flat trembling and angry with suppressed rage after something particularly nasty had got to him, and Patrick learned to talk nonsense and gentle him, making love to him like soothing a frightened horse.  
They saw each other two or three nights a week, always at Patrick’s flat. Sometimes weekends too. But not enough, thought Patrick, not enough, who realised he had fallen like a fool, completely and utterly head-over-heels.

  
XXX

  
After Anoush had left for work, it felt flat and boring to be still lying in bed, so Patrick got up, showered and dressed. If he got into work early, he could add an extra half hour or so onto his lunch break, which would be useful as he’d arranged to meet Nicola for lunch. He set off to work cheerfully, the day had begun well and the rest of it was promising fair too.  
Friendship with Nicola, which he’d managed to squander not once but twice in his life, had been restored rather surprisingly due to Lawrie’s incompetence. She’d invited everyone she knew to the first night of the play she was doing in Stratford. Philip had been away on tour, so Nicola had come alone. They’d watched the play in adjoining seats, with some rather polite sharing of programmes and offering of mints. Then they’d gone backstage to a dressing room party, where some of the cast were being such outrageous 'luvvies' that Patrick and Nicola’s eyes kept meeting to share the same joke. It was in considerable good humour that they’d walked to the nearby B-and-B that Lawrie had arranged for them, only to find that she’d booked them a twin room rather than two singles. ‘You have it,’ Patrick had said instantly. ‘I’ll find something else.’ ‘Don’t be _ridiculous!’_ Nicola had replied. So they had prepared for bed with much casual averting of eyes and elaborate unconcern, but as they said friendly goodnights, a headboard several rooms away down the corridor started banging frantically against a wall, with associated sound effects They both found themselves giggling helplessly, just as if they were thirteen and fifteen again.  
So they started a new chapter. He never told her that he’d missed her, or that he was sorry that he’d been such an arse; but Nick being Nick, she would no doubt have been horribly embarrassed if he had.

  
It had to be different to the way it had been before, of course. He saw her maybe once a month or so, to talk to properly. He saw her more often if he went to see her when she was singing somewhere, but then he was most likely to slip away after she’d finished, because there were always so many other people there. Including Philip Scott.  
Nicola didn’t perform with him anymore, at least, not regularly. She was working with a traditional folk musician who seemed to Patrick to be able to play every instrument under the sun, often switching between instruments in the course of one song. He and Nicola shared an enthusiasm for researching the histories of folk songs, and had recorded an album of neglected or almost forgotten songs, which was selling modestly well by the standards of folk music.  
So Patrick and Nicola met for lunches, or an occasional weekend outing. As he left the office and walked to the restaurant, he wondered if she would have one or three of the children with her today. He knew the Scotts employed a nanny, but she had to babysit so many evenings that she was given a corresponding amount of time off during the day. He didn’t mind the twins - they were at the moist stage of toddler-hood, when sticky fingers and runny noses made them fairly unappealing to all but their nearest and dearest, but at least they were just normal, puppyish little boys. But he found Alex, the oldest boy, decidedly disconcerting. He had pale blond hair and startling blue eyes; the sort of looks that made old ladies cluck over him and tell him what a heartbreaker he was going to be. It was his calm, distant manner that undid Patrick though. He never knew how to talk to children anyway, but his attempts at talking to Alex tended to result in an unconsciously withering stare that suggested that young Master Scott saw absolutely no point in the Merrick boy at all. So it was with some relief that he arrived at the restaurant - a plastic-tablecloth sort of place pretending to be an American diner, but ideal for children - to find Nicola on her own.  
“Where is everyone?” he asked as they slid into a booth.  
“Philip’s got the twins. And Alex is at school.”  
“At _school?_ ” He hadn’t even realised that Alex had got to that age. “And what does he think of that?”  
“He _hated_ it! Said he knows how to read, - which is true - so he couldn’t see the point.” Nicola smiled. “But he seems to have made friends with someone called Lily and someone else called Emily, and since then he’s stopped complaining.”  
They scanned the menus, and Nicola said that she was starving, ordering the largest size of all-day breakfast. Patrick looked at her, sensing something different about her. But different in a familiar way.  
“Nick, are you ‘blooming’ again?” he asked.  
She grinned reluctantly. “Well, yes actually but it’s still early days, so not officially yet.”wh  
Apart from the theoretical need to provide an heir for Mariot Chase, Patrick felt no urge to reproduce himself _whatsoever_. He couldn’t understand Nicola’s equanimity.  
“You’re following in your mother’s footsteps, aren’t you?” he said, slyly teasing to cover his mild embarrassment at the subject.  
“I am not!” He must have smiled disbelievingly, because she added, “This will definitely be the last one.” She sounded as though she meant it.  
“Would you like a girl this time?”  
She grimaced. “I wouldn’t know what to _do_ with a girl.”  
“The same as you do with the boys surely?”  
“Like me, you mean. But what if she _wants_ to wear pink and do ballet and play with Barbie dolls?”  
“Give her away free to a good home?”  
Luckily Nicola laughed. The radio, always on in the background, started playing a familiar song.  
“Do you hate it?” Patrick asked sympathetically, noticing Nicola’s brief frown.  
“Philip _loathes_ it. I mean, throwing radios out of windows loathes it. But I reckon we can’t afford to hate it that much. Especially now.” Her hand went to her stomach in an instinctive and entirely unconscious gesture.  
The song in question had been the summer’s major hit, but that wasn’t how it had started life. A few years previously Philip and Nicola had made a record. A labour of love, recorded in odd spare half-hours of studio time, of a dozen old songs that Philip had written with a school-friend. It was only intended to press a few copies, enough to be able to present the now dead friend’s mother with a recording of his songs. A couple of critics listened to it and wrote rare glowing reviews, a few tracks off the album were actually played on national radio in the niche corners of the schedules; they distributed more copies and they sold to a small but discerning audience. That supposedly was that, until the manager of an up-and-coming female pop star picked up on one of the songs. Her version of the song was over-sentimental and gushy, with a huge backing track and the subtleties of the melody fog-horned over, but it was commercial, especially after it was used as part of the soundtrack to that summer’s surprise rom-com hit film. And however much he hated it, as co-writer Philip was raking in the writer’s royalties, (as well as the friend’s mother who was suddenly enjoying an unexpectedly comfortable retirement).  
“What’s it really about?” Patrick asked, as the song faded under the DJ’s chatter. “It’s not actually a love song at all, is it?” The song’s placement within the film had given it an implied romantic meaning. Patrick, who had listened often to Nicola’s version found the lyrics more ambiguous, full of yearning and escapism, with lines about wanting ‘to be in the heart of your green dreams‘, and ‘drift down with you to a sky filled with stars‘.  
“He always says they wrote it about being bored out of their minds in the physics classroom on a hot day, and wishing they were messing around on the river instead,” Nicola explained.  
“That’s not what you were thinking about when you sang it, though. Is it?” asked Patrick curiously. Nicola’s voice had a pure, almost unearthly quality, like ‘angels bending near the earth’, he always thought, an effect particularly noticeable when she sang unaccompanied as she had in that song.  
She thought about it, obviously mentally editing the story for him. “He did take me there once. The river, I mean, to look at the birds. But when we recorded that song, Phil was leaving the band and it was being a bit ….bumpy. They’d had - not exactly a fight - but Dai had managed to smash up the guitar Phil had in the studio that day. And we only had about ten minutes time left to use, so he said, sod it, we’ll do it without. I wasn’t thinking about the words at all, just hoping they kept coming.”  
Patrick listened, fascinated, wondering what his working day would be like if someone in the office flew off the handle and decided to beat up the fax machine.  
“Did you have to redo any of it?”  
“No, we used it as it was.”  
“The cleverness of you,” he said, admiringly. “But aren’t Dai and Philip still friends?” He often saw them together when he went to hear Nicola sing.  
“Oh yes,” said Nicola, as if it was obvious. “They sorted it out that same night.”  
Patrick contrasted that uncomfortably with the years it had taken him to restore relations with Nicola.  
“Are you coming this Sunday?” she asked him. She had a relaxed Sunday evening folk night slot at a pub once a month.  
“Probably,” he said, meaning almost certainly.  
“We’ve found an Indian restaurant that stays open really late even on a Sunday. We go on to it afterwards sometimes. If you wanted….?”  
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he said hastily. He felt ridiculously glad that she had _tried_ to invite him, even if she did obviously expect him to slide out of it.  
“Jan and Miranda come. You _like_ Miranda,” she pointed out, but sensing futility didn’t push it.  
After a pause, she said daringly, “Am I ever going to meet him?”  
“Who?”  
“Not my business, I know,” she said cheerfully. “But you do seem different.”  
He could have let it go, and she wouldn’t have persisted. But he couldn’t resist saying, “Different how?”  
“Well,” she said, teasing. “It seems like you might have grown up at last!”  
She made it obvious she was joking, and in much the same spirit he pretended to be offended. “Huh! It wasn’t me telling stories about their friends smashing up each other‘s toys!”  
Her eyebrows went up at the word toys, but he mentally congratulated himself on turning the subject away from any further suggestion of lovely dinners together. Not just because he always felt uncomfortable in any situation where there would be lots of people, but because it was even worse when one of them was going to be Philip Scott. Not that Philip had ever been anything but affable when they had been thrown together, but Patrick was under no illusions that Philip Scott’s evening would be quite complete without the added presence of Patrick Merrick.

  
XXX

  
Anthony Merrick phoned him in the office that afternoon. “Any chance you could spare me half an hour this evening? Something’s come up and I need to run it past you. At the club?”  
Patrick wondered what this could be about. His father’s tone had been perfectly casual, so he supposed it couldn’t be anything too ominous. His parents had been at Mariot Chase for the weekend, so it might just be estate business. He hoped.  
The thought of home distracted him, and he was slow to concentrate on work.  
He had to do something about it. Or tell his parents - his father really - that he couldn’t do anything about it. Even after that terrible row with Nicola, he had still considered marriage as a hypothetical idea; had reviewed all the females of his acquaintance; the plain, the hopeless, the socially awkward, who might be willing to settle for companionship; or the obsessive dog-breeders or pony showing types who might want no more from a husband than having the bills paid. It had only been after meeting Anoush that he had realised the sheer impossibility and fraudulent hypocrisy of the idea. He recalled Nick’s blazing fury and fierce scorn, and flinched inwardly at the stupidity of his former self.

  
XXX

  
He’d taken Anoush to Mariot Chase not long after they’d met. There were still things that they didn’t yet know about each other.  
When he’d first suggested it, Anoush had been diffident. “Do you want me to drive you?” he’d asked doubtfully.  
Patrick, about to say that no, he usually went by train, suddenly saw that Anoush needed cover, and he said, “Yes. I want you to drive me down.”  
So that’s what they did. Patrick had chosen a weekend when he knew his parents had unmissable appointments in town. Nellie still lived in retirement in her set of rooms at the back of the house, but she disliked stairs these days and was increasingly deaf; so unless they actually danced naked past her windows she was unlikely to notice anything.  
In his most fanciful moments he’d had mad fantasies about getting Anoush enthused about hawking, and being able to keep him with him always at Mariot Chase as his official falconer. He’d told him about the Arab falconers who hunted houbara bustard across the desert with their saker falcons. But falconry was as alien to Anoush as Plantagenet princes, and he looked with blank indifference at the old hawking equipment left in the abandoned mews.  
He liked the walled garden though. The fountain wasn’t working so they sat on the rim, the stone warm and welcoming in the late summer sun.  
“Hundreds of years, the Merricks have lived here,” said Patrick. “And now it all stops with me.”  
Anoush gazed at the sleepy old house, its rows of mullioned windows impenetrable in the sunlight. “My family were arranging a marriage for me,” he said at last. “We were supposed to be married as soon as I had qualified and started a job.”  
“What - what was she like?” asked Patrick, feeling quite unreasonably jealous.  
“I don’t know.” For a moment he said no more, while Patrick stared at the overgrown grass, dry and stalky and long gone to seed. When it was apparent that Anoush was going to say no more, Patrick said “I think I have to tell my parents. It’s just getting up the courage.”  
“What will they do?”  
Patrick pictured his parents’ faces and his imagination failed him. Sometimes he wondered if they suspected already. He had stopped going to Communion long before he’d stopped going to Mass altogether, and his father had noticed but never commented. But that could mean all sorts of things.  
“I don’t know,” he answered at last.  
Anoush eyed the line of chimneys far above. “They won’t throw you off the roof though?”  
“No!”  
“Not so much courage then,” said Anoush, but he said it quite gently.

  
XXX

  
He showed Anoush the secret entrance to the priest’s hole, and led him through the muffling darkness to the hiding place. Inside the tiny room, he opened the casement and a faint breeze made the dust motes dance in the air around them.  
He’d been chattering on, all round the house, through the ballroom, the chapel, the long gallery. Now he fell silent.  
He pushed the door, and it slid silently shut. “It’s completely hidden,” he said. “No-one could find us in here.”  
“We are safe in here?” Anoush repeated, his voice lingering on ‘safe’.  
“Completely safe,” said Patrick, his own voice coming out husky.  
They kissed frantically as they fumbled urgently at belts and buttons. Then Patrick, facing the crucifix on the wall, suddenly looming large, thought, ‘No! We can’t do it _here!_ ’  
As if understanding, Anoush turned him to the window. With his hands braced on the narrow ledge, he saw the sunlight edging the wisteria leaves, and the thick, green, secret world underneath. Some tiny insects were busy under there, and he thought, as if from a great distance, here’s us doing this and they have no idea.  
He could never stop himself from swearing when he was about to explode, and he heard himself now - ‘Oh Jesus Christ, bloody hell, _Jesus_ ’ and the horrible corner of his brain that wouldn’t stop questioning thought, ‘I shouldn’t be saying _that!_ ’  
Anoush, close to his ear, said, “Say my _name!_ ” and he did, and his mind at last let him float free.  
His next words came of their own volition as they collapsed together afterwards, panting, hearts thudding. “I love you,” he said, then was suddenly afraid, as his breathing gradually slowed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”  
“Why not? Unless it’s not true?”  
“It is true,” he said, “I think.”  
Anoush rarely smiled, but he did now, until a broad grin covered his face.  
“What? What’s funny?”  
“You! So English!”  
“I suppose I am,” he said, relieved. “I can’t really help it, you know.”  
They sat shoulder to shoulder against the wall, hands lightly, proprietarily, resting on each other’s legs. The crucifix was in his eyeline again.  
“How do you make this right?” he asked.  
Anoush followed his gaze and shook his head softly, before looking back at him. “I think if Allah exists he doesn‘t care what we do to each other.”  
“You don’t think he - God - will punish you?”  
“No. I think people do that.”

XXX

  
Patrick walked the short distance to his father’s club, an old-fashioned place redolent with history and privilege; where old men who could have been Bertie Wooster in their younger days snoozed discreetly behind their newspapers.  
“Drink?” asked his father. Patrick hesitated, then asked for whisky. He hardly drank at all these days because Anoush didn’t. Before, he’d come in every night and polished off the previous night’s bottle, or more likely, opened another one.  
Anthony got straight to the point. “Peter Marlow came to see me this weekend - with rather an interesting proposal.”  
“Peter?” This was unexpected.  
“Seems he’s been talking with some of our chaps, and heard that Widdicombe’s looking to retire in the next year or two. He thought this might be the right moment to put his case.”  
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Patrick.  
“Before we employ a new estate manager, he asked if we’d consider leasing him the land.”  
“Leasing the land!” This was entirely out of the blue.  
“Effectively to be our tenant farmer.”  
“But why? Isn’t Trennels enough for him?”  
“Peter is worrying about the day Giles chooses to come home and take over. Which could be sooner rather than later the way these defence cuts keep happening.”  
“I can’t see Giles being much of a farmer,” said Patrick, feeling sympathy for Peter, who clearly belonged to Trennels in a way that he doubted Giles ever would.  
“He’s entitled to try. It will be his,” Anthony pointed out.  
“Poor Peter. All that work.”  
“Well, quite. Which is why he wants to do this. Run both farms until the day Giles comes home, and then if Giles kicks him out, he’s still got a smaller but viable business farming our land.”  
Patrick sat silently, mulling it over. He was mainly thinking about it from Peter’s point of view. His father eyed him thoughtfully, as if waiting for him to make the obvious objection.  
Finally Anthony said, “Only there was a time when I thought you wanted to live there and take the place over when the time came? “  
Patrick nodded. “Then I thought you were right and I should try standing on my own feet for a while.”  
“And so you have,” said his father, an undeniable note of pride in his voice, to Patrick’s quick, secret pleasure.  
“It seems I liked it once I’d tried it,” he added, flippantly.  
It was true that Patrick’s first job had fallen into his reluctant lap via a connection of his father’s. But since then he’d followed a mostly upwards trajectory of side-shuffles and promotions, and had moved well beyond his father’s influence. And somewhat to his surprise had come to realise that he was not only good at the work, but enjoyed it most of the time.  
His father nodded in acknowledgement, as if to imply that he’d expected that all along, and had just been waiting for his idiot son to catch up. “So you wouldn’t have any inherent objection to me discussing this further with Peter. I’ll need to look at the figures and see what sort of detailed proposal he comes up with.”  
“Yes,” said Patrick. “Why not? I take it we’re not talking about any of the paddocks round the house?” His parents’ old hunters and his own retired point-to-pointer still lived there peacefully at grass.  
“No indeed,” agreed his father. “In fact, I’m looking out for a new hunter for next year. Two maybe, if we sell the London house.” Anthony had announced that he intended to stand down at the next election.  
Setting his empty glass down, Anthony said with a studied lack of concern, “Of course, I intend to see out the rest of my days there. But once I’m dead and gone, there’s no reason you shouldn’t sell the old place.”  
“Pa! _No!”_  
“Why not?” his father replied. “It’s not entailed. We don’t have the problem the Marlows have.”  
“Yes, but pa … it’s always been Merrick’s!”  
His father gave him an odd half-smiling look; did he know something, thought Patrick, bewildered. “Times change,” Anthony said. “A house like ours should be a blessing, not a millstone round your neck. It has been for me. But you should feel quite free to do with it as you will, without worrying about me turning in my grave. Give it to the local cats’ home if you like.”  
“Cats! Never! The Injured Jockeys maybe,” answered Patrick, lightly, trying to hide the raw, scandalized sense of utter shock he was feeling.  
“Fair point,” said his father. “I’m planning to be around for quite a while yet, you understand. But I thought I should say this while I had the chance. One never knows what will come up. And you can’t let your entire life revolve around something that you didn’t actually choose for yourself.”  
“I can’t imagine selling it ever. Honestly,” said Patrick.  
“Well, it’s not something to worry about now. Just remember I said it, won’t you?” Anthony beckoned to the elderly waiter. “Now, have you got time for another drink?”

 

  
XXX

  
Feeling somewhat light-headed from both the unaccustomed whiskies and his father’s words, Patrick only just arrived back at his flat before Anoush arrived. Really it would be much better if Anoush could just live there with him all the time.  
He put some pasta on to cook. “I’ve been thinking of looking for a bigger place to live,” he said. “Somewhere with a second bedroom, and a bit more space.”  
Anoush raised one elegant eye-brow. Patrick suspected his flat was already considerably more spacious than the room in a shared terraced house that Anoush rented.  
“I could have a lodger then - a flatmate sort of?”  
“And would this ‘lodger’ sleep in the spare bedroom?”  
“Certainly not!”  
“Then I think that sounds like a _very_ good idea,” said Anoush.  
Patrick turned the gas off under the pasta. Dinner could wait.

  
XXX

  
They lay comfortably sprawled on the living room carpet later. The television was on in the background, a film that they’d started watching, then lost interest in.  
“What do you think heaven is like?” asked Patrick sleepily.  
Anoush usually entered into the spirit of Patrick’s rhetorical questions. “ _Hot,_ ” he said now. “I think it will be a lovely warm place. Not like here.”  
Patrick smiled. Anoush always complained about the cold and damp. “What else?”  
“It will be like a holiday. A sunny day at the beach. Children playing. People sunbathing.”  
“What will we be doing?” asked Patrick curiously.  
“I’ll be lying back, enjoying the sun. You’ll be like you are now.” Patrick was lying crossways, his head comfortably pillowed on Anoush’s thigh.  
“You’ll be reading,” continued Anoush.  
“I will? What will I be reading?”  
“Oh, one of your history books, I expect. Every now and then you will read me a bit.”  
A moment of insight struck Patrick. “Will you be interested?”  
“Sometimes. Not always. But I won’t _mind_.”  
Patrick tilted his head and looked up at Anoush’s face and recognised the deep light in his eyes that passed for a smile. “What about everyone else?” he asked.  
“They won’t care. They’ll just be having a good time themselves.”  
Patrick pictured the scene that Anoush had created for him. “That sounds oddly achievable,” he said at last.  
“Yes,” said Anoush. “it wouldn’t be heaven if we didn’t think we could get to it, would it?”


	3. How the Hairy Monster lost his hair.

_“Daddy_ ,” said Toni winningly. “Can I do a make-over on you?”  
“If I can go to sleep while you do it?” Philip replied hopefully.  
“Of course!” said Toni, delighted. “Come into my beauty parlour. Can I do your nails too?”  
“You can do whatever you like as long as I don’t have to be awake.” Philip answered, yawning hugely. He hadn’t returned from last night’s concert until well into the early hours of the morning. Nicola, leaving very early with the twins for a day out on the Tommy Noddy had suggested that she not go after all, but he had sleepily told her not to be so daft. Nine year old Ray and Francis would be devastated to have their promised and planned-for trip postponed, especially as if they didn’t go this Saturday several more weekends would pass before they could try again; Philip being about to go away on tour.  
Alex, rising twelve, who had decided the year before that he wasn’t all that keen on sailing, could amuse himself quite happily. He tended to be self-sufficient in his passions. Anoush, in an idle moment, had once showed him how to write his name in Arabic letters, and fascinated by the swirling, incomprehensible calligraphy, Alex had asked to be shown the whole alphabet and then spent hours practising, till his room was littered with smudgy sheets of letters. He could now read and write several phrases in Arabic. His current enthusiasm though was for copying detailed drawings from the Grey’s Anatomy his grandfather had given him. He disappeared off to his room, leaving them to it.  
Six year old Toni sucked up attention like a sponge. She looked deceptively like Jan at the same age, apart from her cat-like green eyes. She chattered relentlessly as various pink ponies were lined up along the kitchen table, waiting their turn. Philip, in the old rocking chair watched idly as she proceeded to paint his nails with glittery gloop, then obediently closed his eyes for her to brush some hideous shade of eye shadow over them, the perfect excuse to sink into a light doze.  
He couldn’t have been properly asleep for long; he was woken with a start by Alex.  
“ _Dad!_ She’s cutting your hair!”  
He looked up into the startled eyes of his son, gazing at him with a sort of delighted horror. He raised a hand and found a wholly unfamiliar stretch of bare neck under it.  
Toni, who been blissfully happy, snipping away, squeaked in protest.  
“Bloody hell, Toni, what have you _done?_ ”  
“That’s a Bad Word, Daddy.”  
Philip said quite a lot more bad words. Alex looked at his sister. “What are you going to do? Tell Mum he swore after you _cut his hair?_ ”  
Toni felt her first twitch of doubt. Her father’s anger was a fictional beast that she’d never seen awakened. Even now his expression as he ran his fingers through the ragged ends of his hair was stunned rather than angry. But if Mummy was cross with her she knew about it. It made her feel a bit squirmy inside thinking about it.  
Philip looked at the strands of dark blonde hair lying on the kitchen floor.  
“Toni, go and get the dustpan and brush all that up.”  
She rallied. “I haven’t finished yet, Daddy. It needs doing on the other side.”  
“I don’t think so. We need to go and find a barber to sort _this_ out.”  
“You’d better wipe that stuff off your face too,” pointed out Alex, managing to stay straight-faced.  
Philip shot him a look. “Are you laughing?”  
“Only on the inside,” Alex replied, the same answer that had landed him in a lunch-time detention at school earlier that week. (Not for the first time either. He had a feeling his mother wasn’t going to find his end-of-term report amusing reading.)  
“Smartarse,” was all Philip said in reply.  
“To be fair, Dad,” said Alex judicially, “you are getting a bit old to still have long hair.”  
“Christ, Alex, hit a man while he’s down, why don’t you?”  
“Daddy,” said Toni, trying and failing to make a good job of brushing up the loose hair. “Can we have fish-finger sandwiches for lunch?” This was a treat that he made for them when Nicola was away, because she had never understood their appeal.  
“No!” he said, then that struck him as unfair. “At least, _Alex_ can. You’re having bread and water. _If_ you’re lucky. Stale bread if we’ve got any. _And_ you’re going to bed early.”  
Toni started to pout.  
“I should let discretion be the better part of valour, if I were you,” Alex told her, a phrase that his aunt Jan had taught him, having learnt to have such things handy around her nephew.  
Toni just stuck her tongue out at him. “Show off,” she complained, uncomprehending.  
Philip translated for her. “He means that if you’re safely in bed before your mother comes home, she’ll have till the morning to calm down.”  
“Oh.”  
Philip eyed his daughter, standing there holding a dustpan full of hair. “Put that lot in the bin then,” he told her, then attempting to sound severe, added, “How would _you_ feel if someone was throwing all _your_ hair in the bin?”  
Toni, whose silver-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders like a waterfall, looked suddenly distraught. “Daddy, I’m _sorry!_ ”

 

XXXXXX

 

Toni was indeed safely in bed (but not having had just stale bread and water for either lunch or tea) before Nicola arrived home with two shattered but very satisfied boys. Seeing Philip with his hair cut short and off his face, she had been reminded with a slight shock of just how handsome he was. Not that it would do to actually _tell_ him that.  
She always came back from a day’s sailing feeling energised and at peace with the world; even after the relative stress of keeping two nine-year-olds safe, while letting them think that _they_ were really doing all the sailing.  
She followed Philip to bed after checking all the children‘s lights were off, and found him face down with the duvet pulled up over his neck.  
“My neck feels cold,” he grumbled, as she lifted the duvet and slid in behind him. She nuzzled into him affectionately, breathing in the familiar smell of him from the unfamiliar contours of the back of his neck.  
“I don’t know what you were thinking of,” she said. “You know what she did to Spooky Head.”  
“Oh God. Now you’re telling me I look like _Spooky Head?_ ” Spooky Head was a plastic doll’s head hairdressing toy, originally with long polyester curls and a normal, if vacant, blue-eyed expression; now an object of nightmares.  
Amused, she said approvingly, ”You’ve got a neck now,” and kissed him gently on the nape.  
“It’s no good,” he said, sadly. “I won’t be able to do anything. All my strength is gone. I’ve been Delilah’d.”  
“Oh well. It might be that I just don’t fancy you any more, anyway,” she said, taking her hands off him.  
“I wouldn’t blame you,” he said mournfully. “I’m just an old, old man with no hair.”  
Suppressing a laugh, she gave a stage sigh and turned over. “I’ll just read for a bit then.”  
But as she knew he would, he’d rolled over and caught her arm before her hand could close over the book on the bedside table. He pulled her back into his arms.  
“You smell of the sea again,” he said, as he happily reclaimed her.

 

XXXX

 

Alex, still reading illicitly, jumped as his door was pushed open suddenly. It was only Toni, attracted by the fine crack of light showing around the frame of the door.  
“What are you doing?” he whispered, crossly.  
“I can’t sleep,” she protested.  
“Well, go away and not be asleep somewhere else,” he said.  
But Toni had an impressive trick when she was unhappy, of transforming almost cartoonishly in front of his eyes. She sank down, becoming smaller, paler and almost wraith-like, while her eyes became correspondingly larger, darker and sadder. Alex didn’t know where his heart-strings were, (he certainly hadn’t found them in Grey’s), but he knew when they were being tugged. He’d seen her do this before, but all the same ……..  
As Toni seemed to disappear into a tiny puddle of abject misery on his bedroom rug, he gave in.  
“Oh, come on then,” he said. Toni instantly bounded up and onto his bed and burrowed into the covers.  
He was annoyed with himself for falling for it again. He had been about to tell Toni that he didn’t think either Mum or Dad were particularly angry about _anything_ \- as he’d padded along the corridor past their room on his way to the bathroom earlier, he’d heard them both laughing.  
But having gained the bed, Toni was wriggling around taking up far more than her fair share of space, using her bony knees and elbows against him, and he felt his sympathy evaporate. She could just wait till the morning.


	4. A Weekend Visit.

Nicola, entering the kitchen with her arms full of odd bits of laundry from the corners of Ray’s room, was struck by an atmosphere that almost felt like the aftermath of a row. Then she thought she must be mistaken, because Philip, leaning against the counter stirring coffee, and Alex, zipping up his backpack and seemingly on his way out, both glanced her way in apparent calm.  
She dumped her pile in front of the washing machine, as Philip, out of habit, poured her a coffee too.  
“Does that have to be on there now?” she asked, nodding at the guitar case that lay in the middle of the big old-fashioned kitchen table.  
“He wants us to sell it,” said Philip.  
Bemused, Nicola glanced at Alex and said, “I shouldn’t think Phil’s sold a guitar in his life.”  
“Yes, and isn't _that_ why we live in a bloody enormous house but we still don’t have an actual spare room for people to _sleep_ in,” replied Alex.  
That wasn’t entirely true, or at least it hadn’t been. The twins had always shared a room - had always _wanted_ to share - until recently both they and their belongings had started to spread out and Ray had taken over what had been the spare room. Which was why, in preparation for Lawrie’s visit this weekend, Nicola had spent the morning trying to turn a teenage boy’s pit back into a pleasant guest room, and was subsequently not in the best of moods. She glanced at Philip, who looked uncharacteristically unamused by Alex’s smart comment.  
He said, in an expressionless voice, “He wants a car instead.“  
Nicola looked closer and recognised the case as one that belonged to Alex, containing the guitar that had been a special present for his sixteenth birthday, when he‘d seemed keen enough to justify it. Nicola recalled the conversation they’d had at the time. “He’s the one who’s _really_ got it,” Philip had said, having taught them all to play from a young age. (“What about Toni?” Nicola had asked, because Toni at ten could play guitar, keyboards and drums, all more than averagely well for her age. “I think she’s going to be more of a performer than a musician,” he’d predicted.)  
“It’s obvious, Mum,” said Alex, with the patient air of one who’s gone through all this once before. “If I sell it I could use the money for a car. I’m going to need one to get a job this summer, and for Uni. And this is worth enough to get me something that goes, isn’t it?”  
Nicola, thrown, looked at her son. Tall, good-looking, with a place to study medicine at Cambridge - assuming he got the right grades from his A-levels, which he _would_ \- he was that sort of student, he looked back at her with the unruffled assurance of his eighteen years.  
“You won’t need to do that,” she protested. “We’ll get you a car, if you’re really going to need one.”  
“I don’t want to have to ask you for stuff all the time. It’s not right when I’ve got something valuable I can sell. It’s a bit obscene really when you think of all the people who’ve got nothing.”  
Feeling guiltily irritated Nicola couldn’t resist a slight dig, “I didn’t notice you worrying so much about the starving millions when you wanted those trainers?”  
“That’s different,” he said, shifting defensively in his designer-clad feet. “At least I’m getting lots of use out of these. _That’s_ just sitting in my room going to waste. And you know I’m not going to have any time for it at Cambridge. I‘ll have much more important things to focus on.”  
Alex was astonished at the look his mother shot him. Accustomed to his self-appointed role as sensible and reliable elder son, he was used to seeing his mother’s fierce blue-eyed glare directed at one of the others, and found it disconcerting to have it fixed on him. He found himself blameless though, it must be Aunt Lawrie’s visit winding her up.  
“Anyway, I’m late,” he added, picking up his backpack. “Is it alright if I’m not here for the Grand Entrance? Only I’m going round to revise at Jo's.”  
“Yes, fine,” said Nicola, wondering if it was wrong to hope that they wouldn’t spend the _entire_ time studying. Although at least he only had one more paper to sit and then he might let himself have some fun.  
“What can you do?” said Philip sadly, after Alex had gone. “We tried to bring him up to be a long-haired layabout and all he wants to do is to go and save peoples’ lives.”  
Nicola smiled, but feeling growly inside, said, “I could do with less of the ‘holier-than-thou’ stuff.” Philip might well never have sold a guitar, but he had certainly given them away, over the years, as well as considerable amounts of his time, always shrugging off acknowledgement or thanks.  
“Oh, he’ll grow out it,” said Philip. That was his answer to everything, thought Nicola, and she didn’t think it was always true. Take Lawrie, for instance.  
Philip lifted the case off the table, and Nicola, recalled to the present, asked, “What _are_ you going to do with it?”  
“Give him the money and I’ll put this away somewhere. He might want it back one day. Even doctors have to relax sometimes.”  
He paused in the doorway as Nicola started pulling things out of the fridge. “When are we laying out the red carpet?”  
“She said lunchtime, but that could easily mean three o’ clock or later.” Lawrie had affected unpunctuality in recent years, falsely imagining that it made her seem more interesting.  
“And who are we having the pleasure of meeting?”  
“She said definitely the _double_ bed, but that’s all I know so far. Apart from the bit about him seeing you at Glastonbury and being terrifically excited to meet you..”  
Philip couldn’t have looked gloomier at the thought, but forbore from comment.  
In truth, Nicola herself would rather not have had visitors this weekend. Philip had been working with Dai again after a hiatus of many years, and had been away for much of the spring touring their new album; while she’d been involved in a series of concerts herself. So they hadn’t had a proper family weekend for quite some time. Lawrie coming was bearable, because she was practically family anyway, but Nicola could have done without her bringing this mysterious new boyfriend in tow.  
Piling lunch things on the table, she reflected.  
Lawrie had had many relationships over the years, most often with other actors, sometimes with directors, once a television presenter. But none of them had ever seemed to stick, until three years before, to everyone’s astonishment, Lawrie had announced that she was married.  
That they had just got married by themselves without any fuss or audience said something about Lawrie’s new husband; that he was eminently sane, capable and practical struck Nicola with surprise when she finally got to meet him. Andrew was in charge of the stage lighting at the theatre where Lawrie had been appearing. Philip had joked that Lawrie had finally chosen someone who would always be able to put her in a good light, but what it really came down to, thought Nicola, once she got to know Andrew, was that Lawrie had chosen someone who would never mind lighting the gas for her. He had a gruff, wry sense of humour with which he masked his essential good-heartedness. The story of how they first got talking to each other was typical; Lawrie had burst out of her dressing room door and quite literally fallen into the arms of the passing Andrew. They were in an old theatre and one of the many resident spiders had scuttled out from behind a make-up pot just as Lawrie had put her hand on it. As Lawrie told it, he’d been more interested in rescuing the spider than in her, but by the time he’d located, captured and safely released it they’d started to notice each other properly. He told her to call on him again the next time spiders threatened - she took him up on the offer. And more.  
So Nicola was more disappointed than anyone when Lawrie had been seen out with other people, eventually admitting to Nicola that it was all over a couple of months past, and now announcing that she was bringing someone new to visit.  
Having laid a cold lunch on the table, Nicola decided it was best not to wait for Lawrie to arrive. Everyone was in calling distance, apart from Ray. She could have sent Francis to fetch him, but after thinking about Lawrie and her up-and-down love-life, she felt like the fresh air and the walk herself.  
She headed out through the back door and across the rambling garden. The grass had worn, dry patches where balls had been repeatedly kicked, bowled, hit, thrown and caught; and the bushes had a lop-sided, sagging look from being used as goal posts. The space, one of their reasons for moving to this patch of Sussex countryside, had been much used.  
But better even than the garden was what lay beyond it, a wedge shaped patch of woodland. It eventually narrowed to no more than a wide hedge between fields, but the widest part lay behind their garden fence, and the owner - a local farmer - had never minded the children playing in it. There was a trickle of a stream which was dammed and rerouted and dammed again, and enough fallen wood for encampments of dens. And once they’d all grown out of those things there were always times when they needed to mooch off and be on their own. Ray had found the sparrow hawk’s nest the previous summer. In the hope that they would use it again, he had built himself a hide over the winter, and was hidden there now with his camera.  
The dogs had followed Nicola into the woods, so she stopped by the big oak tree and whistled, the two-note owl call that they had arranged as a signal to avoid disturbing the hawks. She waited, enjoying the sunlight filtering green and gold through the canopy, the earthy smell of both new growth and slow decay, the silence and the birdsong.  
After a few moments Ray appeared, walking so quietly that he was surprisingly close before she realised.  
“Is it lunchtime? Only my watch stopped but I knew I was getting hungry,” he asked.  
Nicola thought, not for the first time, how restful he was without his brother around. Francis and Ray used to get into quite a lot of trouble at school at one time, usually instigated by Francis. Nicola and Philip had eventually realised that Ray wasn’t going along with Francis because he was easily led, but because he had a notion - which he couldn’t entirely explain himself - that if he couldn’t _stop_ Francis, he at least ought to be _in_ it with him.  
“Have I called you away at a good moment?” Nicola asked.  
“Yeah, it’s alright. I’d run out of film anyway. I was just lying there thinking actually.”  
Nicola wondered if she would be told what he’d been thinking about, but knew better than to ask.  
“Mum,” he said eventually, building up to it.  
“Yes?”  
“Would you let me take the Tommy Noddy on a trip by myself? When I leave school?”  
“Where to?” she asked, buying time as her heart sank. She had come to discover that having done something herself and letting one of her children do the exact same thing were quite different things indeed.  
“There’s islands around Scotland where the sea-birds nest that you can only get to by boat,” Ray said. “But mainly I’d just like to go sailing by myself. _You_ did.”  
Sensing another trap, Nicola asked cautiously, “And what do you mean by ‘when you leave school’?”  
“Oh, well, when I’m eighteen, I guess. After my A’levels.”  
That much was a relief. He’d been arguing that he ought to leave after his GCSEs because there was ‘nothing he wanted to do that he could possibly need A’ levels for’.  
“Do you mean Francis too?” she asked. ( Because they’d almost always done everything together.)  
“Oh no. Just me.”  
Nicola had learned never to promise anything. “We’ll see. I’ll have to think about it. You’d have to work up to it - like I did.”  
He beamed at this cautious and not very definite yes. He walked slightly too close and bumped her shoulder with his arm, quite hard, but this was more affectionate than it might seem. These off-hand bumps had replaced hugs as the boys grew older and bigger - both now topped her in height.  
But it struck Nicola that they were no longer being very ‘twinnish’. First the separate rooms, now this planned solitary trip.  
“Have you and Francis fallen out?” she asked idly, not really expecting an answer.  
But after a moment, he said, unexpectedly, “There was a girl we both liked.”  
Her heart sank for the second time in as many moments. “Oh?” was all she let herself say. The boys had only just passed their fifteenth birthday, and she hadn’t thought they were seriously interested in girls yet, although they knew plenty, as friends at school.  
Ray looked so dejected though, walking beside her, that she guessed wrongly, “But she liked Francis?”  
“No. Me.”  
“Oh.” All these ‘oh’s, but she felt unaccustomedly helpless. They were at the garden gate now, so she paused before going through. “What did you - are you doing?”  
“Oh, well. I decided not to bother. It wasn’t worth - well, you know…”  
“And what did _she_ think of that?” Nicola asked.  
“Seems like she could do without either of us anyway. She went off with someone else.”  
He shook his shaggy hair out of his eyes, glanced sidelong at her and gave his quick, slanting smile. (His father’s smile; this one was his father’s son more than any of the others, she often thought.) She ached for him, because she could see that despite the smile he’d been miserable. But what could she tell him? That no-one ends up with the person they like at fifteen? Because _knowing_ that doesn’t change how it _feels_ at all.  
So she squeezed his arm as much as he’d let her, and they crossed the poor, battered garden together.  
Lawrie surprised them by arriving almost as soon as they started lunch. Theirs was the sort of house where no-one ever uses the front door; they heard the slow crunch of wheels on gravel as Lawrie’s low-slung sports car drove round to the back of the house. Francis, filling his glass at the kitchen sink, saw them first.  
“Mum,” he said. “ _Who_ did you say Aunt Lawrie was bringing?”  
Something in his voice brought the others curiously to the window.  
“Isn’t he a bit - young?”  
Philip and Nicola, who hadn’t immediately leapt up, exchanged glances and went rather warily to the window.  
“Oh, but that’s Romeo!” exclaimed Nicola, a comment that made no sense to any of the others. Earlier in the spring she had gone by herself to see the production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in which Lawrie was appearing - as Juliet’s mother.  
Although a tiny part, it had been one of Lawrie’s best performances for some time, and she was likely to be nominated for several theatre awards for actress in a supporting role. All of Lawrie’s most convincing parts had been characters who were scared in some way; and her ‘mother’ had been terrified. Frightened but appeasing towards her controlling husband, and, more than that, scared by the fearlessness of her own daughter.  
And Romeo had been dazzling. Half of the audience had fallen in love with him, and poor Juliet hadn’t stood a chance. But the thin, dark young man who climbed out of the car, and stood diffidently looking at the house with his hands in his jacket pockets didn’t bear much resemblance to the charismatic young god he had been on stage.  
Her three teenagers were parrying jokes. “Maybe she’s adopting him.” “Perhaps she thought we‘d like someone to play with.”  
“Will you three shut up!” hissed Nicola, and bracing herself rather, went out to welcome them.  
Romeo’s name was actually Luca. Nicola shook his hand and made friendly small talk. He seemed rather shy. On stage he had been magnificent, seductive, compelling, his presence seeming to fill the stage. But in real life he could hardly get a sentence out.  
Nicola hoped her own chatter had covered up Philip, who under pretext of giving Lawrie a kiss on the cheek had murmured, “Mrs Robinson, I presume.” There was rather a defiant tilt to Lawrie’s chin as they all filtered back into the house.  
Francis, Ray and Toni, who could all behave charmingly when needed, gave their best polite handshakes and murmured greetings. Philip pulled beers out of the fridge and everyone eventually settled themselves back round the table.  
Conversation had the falsely hearty tone of people being polite to visitors. The older Lawrie got, the longer it seemed to take her to slough away the ‘voice’ she used with her theatre friends and revert to what Nicola thought of as ‘real’ Lawrie. The run of Romeo and Juliet was over - there’d been a ‘simply marvelous’ Last Night party. The drive out of London had been 'murder'. She asked casually after the absent Alex and his A’levels. Luca didn’t say much, but had his plate piled high with game pie and cold chicken. Lawrie, fussy about her weight these days, took only salad.  
It was odd, thought Nicola, that Luca _wasn’t_ obviously good looking. He must be a very good actor, because she had thought him attractive as Romeo, and yet looking at him now, he was rather odd looking. His eye sockets seemed too big, his cheek bones too prominent, his eyes permanently startled. He reminded her of a deer; all big eyes and slanting cheekbones, an air of being constantly a- tremble, as if about to shy away.  
Nicola, fetching cheese and fruit bowl from the kitchen counter, was aware of Luca’s eyes travelling between herself and Lawrie. She wondered if he was comparing them. It was a long time since they could have passed for each other. Lawrie’s hair changed colour and style with every role, while hers was still blonde, highlighted only by the sun and the increasing number of silver hairs. They were both slim, but Lawrie had worked hard to stay straight-up-and-down, boyishly stick thin. Nicola was softer at the edges, with a more lived-in look - literally lived in, she thought with amusement, after three pregnancies.  
Rather predictably, and stammering slightly, Luca asked, “Did people used to mistake you for each other? Lawrie said you pretended to be each other sometimes.”  
“Oh, well, not since we were about twelve,” answered Nicola. “And only people who didn’t know us much.”  
“It’s easy to tell them apart,” said Philip sagely. “Nicola is the beautiful one.” This had the pleasing effect of annoying both of them at once, for different reasons. He smiled complacently back at the twin pair of eyes that glowered at him.  
“Can you tell _we’re_ twins?” interrupted Francis. They had been making rather a point of looking as different as possible, even though they’d never been so identical as to be hard to tell apart. Ray let his hair grow as long as school rules allowed, while Francis went to the opposite extreme and had his clipped on the shortest setting Nicola would let him. It had even become a family joke that Francis had got his nose broken playing rugby the previous winter on purpose.  
Luca hadn‘t paid much attention to the boys, but after studying them for a minute, he replied, “I guess. But I didn’t realise straightaway.” Pleased, the boys high-fived each other, instantly looking more alike than they had before.  
When they reached the coffee stage the boys disappeared off on their own business, but Toni stayed at the table. Trying to appear sophisticated, she even asked for some coffee although she had to drown it in milk and sugar to get it down.  
“Actually, we were hoping you could help us with something,” said Lawrie. “Luca’s got a screen test on Tuesday.” She looked encouragingly at Luca as if hoping he’d carry on, but he just looked at them with his big eyes.  
“It’s a film about a band in the sixties. Not a real one. He has to be in the band and play guitar. I thought you might be able to give him some tips to get it right, for the audition?”  
“Can you play guitar?” Philip asked Luca.  
Luca shook his head. Lawrie said, “It’s not the _playing_ that matters. If he gets the part they’ll give him a crash course in that anyway. It’s more the attitude, the way he needs to be on stage.”  
“There’s must be thousands of videos you could watch,” said Nicola, practically.  
“Again - we’ll spend _hours_ doing that before they start filming. But something went wrong with the first person they wanted so Luca‘s been called at the last minute. There’s not much time to prepare. So I thought, why not go straight to the horse’s mouth.”  
“I’m the horse’s mouth? It sounds like it ought to be the name of a pub.”  
“So can you show Luca what you do?”  
“Well, as you’ll know if you saw us at Glastonbury, what I do is as little as I possibly can,” Philip told Luca, not entirely truthfully.  
“I was thinking about when you were in Ffurnais,” said Lawrie. “That whole cool and sexy look.”  
“I have absolutely no idea _what_ you’re talking about.”  
“Oh, Phil, don‘t be so provoking!” protested Lawrie. She looked at Nicola for support, but Nicola, amused, just shrugged.  
Toni, who had been listening quietly, letting everyone forget she was there, piped up suddenly, “I bet _I_ could show you. But it’s not something you can fake. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.”  
Lawrie narrowed at eyes at her. “Nonsense. You can be anything you want. You just make the audience believe it.”  
“Oh. So it’s like, if you weren’t really a very nice person, say, you could still make the audience believe you were.”  
Lawrie gazed at Toni, working out if Toni had really meant that the way it sounded; and Toni stared back, her green eyes wide and innocent.  
“You know, Nick, _Kingscote_ is still going.”  
“It is?”  
“They keep asking me to go and present the prizes on Speech Day. Bet they’d give you a good rate on the fees. Daughter of an illustrious former pupil and all that.”  
Toni was unmoved. “You don’t want to send me to boarding school, do you, Mum?”  
“Only at least once every day,” Nicola assured her grimly.  
Philip pushed his chair back. “Come and look at the studio,” he invited Luca. Lawrie was about to follow them, but Nicola swiftly shoved a dirty plate in her hands.  
“ _You_ can help me clear up.”  
“I thought you had a dishwasher.”  
Nicola glared at her meaningly, and Lawrie gave in. Nicola waited until Philip and Luca, followed by Toni, had disappeared down the narrow stairs off the hallway. The house had once had a cellar, which they had had enlarged and converted, and was now a small soundproofed studio, complete with basic recording equipment.  
Hearing the satisfying clunk of the door which sealed them off, Nicola asked, “What are you playing at this time, Lal?”  
“Whatever do you mean?”  
“You know what I mean. How old _is_ he?”  
“What does it matter?” Lawrie said airily. “Age is only a number.”  
“Yes, so what number is he exactly?”  
“Twenty-four, if you must know.”  
Nicola did the maths. “You were in your first job when he was being born! He’s twenty -two years younger! That’s like Kay and Edwin!”  
“So? No-one says anything about _that_ now!”  
“We all _did!_ Plenty! You as much as anyone! Or have you conveniently wiped all that from your memory?”  
“It turned out alright for them, didn’t it?”  
Nicola frowned. Karen’s life was mostly quite contented, she supposed. It was true that she now knew a fair few people who would trade ‘mostly quite contented’ for what they had, but it seemed very little to have settled for at _eighteen_. Had Karen ever _thought?_  
Karen had eventually finished her degree, with the Open University, and now taught part-time at the Adult Education College in Streweminster. She couldn’t work full-time, she said, because Edwin, now retired, got bored hanging around the house all day on his own. The Dodd children had grown up, found careers, moved on; as had Emma, Karen’s own and only child.  
Younger than her half-siblings, older than any of her cousins, Emma wasn’t close to anyone in the family. A clever, shy child, she had more of a look of a Dodd than a Marlow. She had made her parents proud by going to Oxford and graduating with a First, then pleased herself by going travelling. Landing both job and boyfriend in New Zealand, she hadn’t yet come home. ‘Thank goodness for emails,’ Karen had said, ‘Edwin’s never going to manage _that_ plane trip.’ In the past they had spent a fortnight every summer in Switzerland, visiting Rowan, and walking in the mountains; but soon after his seventy-second birthday Edwin had a series of small strokes, which left him weak and easily tired. ‘But he’s getting stronger all the time,’ wrote Karen in emails, optimistically; using the college computers to keep in touch with everyone.  
“Anyway,” said Lawrie, watching Nicola load the dishwasher, “It’s not like _I’m_ planning to make him go and live at Trennels or look after loads of kids. Or get _married_. Times have changed.”  
“Aren’t you still married to Andrew?”  
“Technically.”  
“So what are you doing? Are you getting a divorce?”  
Lawrie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not as if I want to be married to anybody else.”  
“Oh, Lal.” Nicola looked at her twin, and Lawrie looked back, briefly without guile or guise. “What went wrong?”  
“I don’t know. It just got a bit tiring being me all the time, I suppose,” said Lawrie.  
“And what are you being for him?” Nicola nodded in the vague direction of the studio downstairs.  
Lawrie perked up. “I’m being the _experienced_ , older woman obviously. And he’s not complaining. It’s amazing what he can do at his age....”  
“I don’t want to know,” Nicola interrupted hastily. She put the leftover food back in the fridge, and wiped the table. “Lawrie?”  
“Yes?”  
“What - what if he minds? When you get tired of this?”  
“I was rather expecting that he’d be the one to get tired first, actually,” admitted Lawrie. “People usually do get tired of me, you know.”  
Nicola could think of nothing to say to that.  
After a moment, Lawrie said, “I’ll just go and see what they’re up to down there.”  
“Don’t go in if the light’s on over the door,” Nicola told her, probably unnecessarily. They were going to need something to get through this afternoon, she thought, and gazing at the fruit bowl, inspiration struck. When Lawrie returned she was making a jug of Pimms.  
“What are they doing?” she asked.  
“Philip’s teaching Luca how to play something. And Toni’s showing off on the drums.”  
Nicola prickled. “No, she’s not.”  
“Alright, don’t go all mother bear on me.”  
“Well, she _doesn’t_ show off when it’s music. Not when she’s playing something.” Irritated by Lawrie’s still sceptical expression, she added, “Like you when it was acting.”  
Lawrie said, in a more conciliatory tone, “She’s growing into such a beauty. I’d be awfully pleased with her, if I was you.”  
And awfully worried too, Nicola added privately, but that was still a worry for the future. Toni at thirteen considered all boys to be congenital idiots.  
Nicola added an extra slug of Pimms to the jug, just to be sure. They took jug and glasses outside.  
A baggy old hammock hung deep in the shade of a chestnut tree with a selection of wicker garden furniture scattered half in and out of the sunlight around it. Lawrie and Nicola chose loungers in the sun. They chatted intermittently, but between the Pimms and the heat of the afternoon sun, they were pleasurably sleepy by the time Philip and Luca finally came out.  
Lawrie, on the excuse that they hadn’t brought their bags in from the car yet, took Luca away. Philip, carrying a six-pack, peeled two of the cans off, dropped the rest into a cool patch of long grass, and with a deep sigh climbed into the hammock.  
“What did you do with him?” asked Nicola sympathetically.  
“Taught him to play bass a little bit.”  
“Was he any good?”  
“Not much.”  
“Oh. Did you tell him?”  
“Christ, no. It would be like breaking the bad news to Bambi.”  
Nicola, amused at hearing him voice her own thoughts, laughed.  
“Now, if anyone wants me I intend to be asleep.”  
“Fair enough.” She heard the click of the ring pull, then not much. She lowered her lounger a notch closer to horizontal and was idly watching the swallows skimming across the high blue sky, wondering who would disturb them first, when the twins appeared.  
“Can we have one?” asked Francis, seeing the beer.  
“Yes, but why don’t you go and drink it in the woods like normal teenagers?” growled Philip. The boys grinned, and took one each. Reckoning their chances of getting a second one were better if they stayed around, they slumped into the grass.  
After a few moments of idly flicking rolled-up grass stems at each other Francis suggested, “Why don’t I bring the radio out here so we can listen to the cricket, mum?”  
“Oh yes,“ said Nicola, ignoring the faint disembodied groan from the hammock, “That _is_ a good idea.”

In the morning the adults went for a walk, over the mile or so of fields made salty and sea-smelling by the breeze blowing in from the tidal creek - an arm of the harbour where the Tommy Noddy had her mooring. Rather surprisingly, Toni had said she would come, but she took so long getting ready that they set off and left her to catch up. Nicola, glancing back, saw her running behind them and slowed to wait.  
“It took that long to put on T-shirt and shorts?” she asked.  
“Well, I had to choose and I couldn‘t decide,” explained Toni. She was wearing a fitted white T-shirt and a tiny pair of denim shorts, which looked, thought Nicola, as if it should have required no thought at all.  
Philip, leading the way and Lawrie and Luca, wrapped up in each other, were walking far enough ahead to be out of earshot. Luca had grown on Nicola over the previous evening; loosened up by wine, he had relaxed and told some funny stories about himself, and she had begun to see what had charmed Lawrie.  
“Don’t you think it’s disgusting?” said Toni. She was staring at Luca’s arm, reaching across Lawrie’s lower back with his hand resting rather lower than her hip. “She was his mother-in-law. It’s practically incest.”  
“In a _play_ , Toni!”  
“Yes, but it’s still not right, is it. You shouldn’t have let them sleep in the same room. It’s gross at her sort of age.”  
“By ‘her sort of age’ you do mean _my_ age.”  
Toni , catching sight of her mother’s expression faltered only slightly. “Well - exactly. Parents - people your age - don’t still - you know - “  
“No. _Do_ tell me what you think we don’t do anymore at our age.” Nicola looked at Toni with - had she been able to see herself - the same slightly startled expression that her daughter wore looking back at her.  
Toni, wisely, decided not to pursue this line of conversation. Pun the golden retriever had been gently circling them, hoping that somebody would notice the lovely stick she had found in the stream and offer to throw it. For the length of a field Toni obliged her, until they caught up with the others. Meg, the border terrier, couldn’t be bothered with such nonsense, and ran busily along the hedge line stopping to investigate each rabbit hole.  
But later, when the three of them had drawn ahead of Lawrie and Luca, Toni renewed the subject.  
“ _Dad._ When you were twenty-four would _you_ have wanted to go out with someone old ?”  
Philip raised an eyebrow at her, but thought about it. “When I was twenty-four,” he said, “I fancied your mother.”  
“Oh. Did you fancy him back?” she asked Nicola.  
Philip answered for her, “No. She did _not_. It was shocking how she let me pine away.”  
“Really?” Toni, still something of a daddy’s girl at heart, looked at her mother indignantly. “Why not?”  
“I always did, really,” said Nicola.  
“It just took her a while to realise she was onto a good thing,” said Philip, flippantly.  
Toni would have asked more, but her parents were smiling in a way that, while not excluding her, hinted at a time before she existed, and the thought of a time in which she didn’t exist was still inclined to throw her. So she stalked ahead of them, swishing at the long grass with a stick, as if she didn’t care.  
Nicola felt a tinge of sadness that didn’t belong to the day. If only Lawrie, her original other half, could also see when she was ‘onto a good thing’. Nicola had sometimes wondered if Lawrie almost needed to be unsettled, unhappy even, in her own life; always wanting things she couldn't have, as if being contented would leave her nothing to draw on for her acting roles.  
She might have said something of this to Philip, but Toni lingering, and Lawrie and Luca catching up, brought them all close together. He gave her a quite unnecessary hand up where the path joined a low bank, and while the path was wide enough to walk easily two abreast, she felt his fingers comfortingly entwined with hers.  
From here they could see the end of the creek. The tide was out but they could see the light reflecting off the dark, wet ooze and the small boats tilted sideways on the mud waiting for the tide to come in and float them again.  
Toni jumped down onto the shingle at the edge of where water should be, and tossed her stick as far out as she could, so that Pun ran joyously through the watery squelch and splosh to fetch it, returning with mud-black stockings and smelling of sea-weed. (Happily for her, her doggy brain couldn’t foresee the certain misery of a bath later.)  
Childishly, Luca picked up smooth, round pebbles from the shore and tried to skim them, making Lawrie laugh at his attempts. He gave up and lobbed them instead, watching them land in the sludge with a sucking plop..  
Philip imperceptibly increased the warm pressure of his hand round hers, and close to her ear, teasing, murmured, “Wouldn’t you like a nice, fit twenty-four year old now?”  
“Christ, no!” she answered without even thinking.  
“Why not?”  
She looked back at him as he tilted his head closer. There were threads of silver running through the tawny blond hair now, and a fine tracery of lines around his eyes. They could fairly be called laughter lines; the lost look that she’d seen in his eyes when she’d first known him had long gone. He knew her as well as the sea knows the sky, and he still looked at her the same way he had the night he came and found her fast asleep in a pub and took her home to bed.  
“Are you angling for compliments?” she asked.  
“Oh, absolutely.”  
It was only the tiniest, sneakiest little peck of a kiss, but it was enough for Toni, turning in their direction at that moment, to see and make a dramatic pretence of being sick.

XXX

As it turned out, Luca got the part. In the run-up to the film’s release they saw his face on the side of buses, and on posters everywhere, as the production company hyped up their hot young cast of new faces. The critics seemed to like him: ‘ a compelling performance which gives much needed conviction to a weak script and flagging direction'.  
Toni and her friends went to see the film in the cinema, and came back declaring that it had been boring. But they did go and see it twice to give themselves enough time to be bored.  
But before that, other things happened. Alex piled his duvet, an old kettle and his bags into the second-hand but reliable Fiesta he’d bought, and drove away to Cambridge.  
One of Ray’s photos of the sparrow-hawks won a prize in the Under-16s section of the Wildlife Photography Competition.  
Lawrie went to the Oliviers with Luca on her arm, looking timelessly elegant in an expensive, designer, little black dress. She didn’t win the award she was nominated for, but the cameras captured her looking magnanimous in defeat.  
Luca was profiled in a ‘Faces To Watch’ article in one of the Sunday supplements, in which he said that although he and Lawrence Marlow had agreed to go their separate ways he felt as if it had been an immense privilege to be a part of her life for a short time and he would be forever grateful for all that she had taught him.  
Lawrie told Nicola that she and Andrew were giving it another go. They were having a second honeymoon, she said, in a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere. Nicola doubted that was Lawrie’s sort of holiday, but Lawrie sounded happy. There’s a real log-fire and everything, she said. Sheepskin rugs. It would be nice not having to dress up all the time. She could just relax and be herself for a while, she said.

 

Philip and Nicola eventually saw the film when it was shown on TV. At least, Nicola did.  
“This is boring,” said Philip, after the first ten minutes.  
“He must have paid attention to whatever you showed him,” said Nicola, a few minutes later. “He’s quite believable.” But she got no answer, and looked over to find that Philip had fallen asleep sprawled out on the sofa.  
Meg and the cat were engaged in a fierce, private battle, which involved eye-balling each other silently, until one of them gave in. The cat won, as usual, and taking the victor’s position, climbed onto Philip’s chest and curled up with her head under his chin. Resigned, Meggie clambered over his legs and nestled comfortably against them. (Pun who was virtuous, and knew that dogs were not allowed on the furniture, stayed loyally asleep by Nicola’s feet.)  
Amused, Nicola watched this for a while, then returned to watching the film in a dogged, persistent sort of way. It didn’t get much better though.  
Eventually the credits rolled, and she flicked the off button. The cat, sensing what was coming, eyed her resentfully. But Nicola was remorseless. “You’ve had your turn,“ she said. She lifted the protesting cat, and waking him up, took her husband off to bed.


	5. Veined With Gold. (Part One.)

The crowd in the arts centre, a converted church, broke into enthusiastic applause as Nicola’s last notes died away, This was the bit that she disliked most about performing, even now, but she arranged her face into a well-practised smile before following her accompanist off stage. The applause held, and as usual, they were pausing only briefly before turning to go back on stage for the encore, when a front of house staff member, hovering anxiously, caught at Nicola's elbow. Her face puckered nervously as she blurted out, "I'm so sorry. Your - your family have been trying to get hold of you. Can you ring Kirstie on her mobile straightaway?"  
Kirstie was their housekeeper, originally employed as a nanny, but with a change in job title when the children protested that they were far too old for nannies. The ultimate in unflappability, she had weathered many minor teenage disasters when Nicola had been away in the past. Whatever this news was, Nicola was gut clenchingly aware that she didn't want to hear it from this stranger with frightened eyes, the obvious bearer of bad news; so she ducked into the shabby dressing room, fumbling for the phone in her bag. Opening it she saw all the missed calls, from home, from Kirsty's number, from Ray, from Francis, and even one from Alex. Nothing from Philip. That was when everything froze to a stop.

Someone organised a car and put her in it, she couldn't have said who, afterwards. In a numb, endless, waking nightmare she sat in the passenger seat gazing at the headlights of approaching cars. They rose, filled her eyes, were gone; light, dark, light, dark. Dark thoughts threatened to overwhelm her, but she kept trying to clutch at hope again. She wasn’t going to think the worst, she told herself firmly, but like a recalcitrant horse, her thoughts refused to go any further.  
Toni was fine, they'd told her first, both girls were. Bruised from the effects of whiplash, shocked and frightened but unharmed. Philip had been driving Toni and her friend to a party; the girls had been sitting together in the back and the out-of-control car that had sheared off the road into the junction where they waited to pull out had come straight into the driver's side.

He wasn't dead. That was all Kirsty, waiting at the hospital with the boys, could tell her. Yet.

She'd been longing to be there, desperate for the interminable drive to end, but as the car pulled up to the front of the hospital she felt a sense of dread that almost pinned her back into her seat. If she was told - _that_ \- she would wish herself back in the car, back on the journey, back to not knowing.  
Blinking and dazed in the bright light of the reception area, she was directed to the waiting room, where all the family were gathered. Jan, coming from London, and Alex, from Cambridge, had arrived before her. Alex sat on a bench with his arm round Toni, who was curled against him, her eyes closed and her face tear-stained.  
Looking up and seeing Nicola first, he said "They're not _telling_ us anything," He sounded desperately young. At his voice, Toni stirred and opening her eyes, saw her mother. She gave a muffled cry, and Nicola found her in her arms, hugging her in a way that she hadn't done since she was a little girl. She supposed she must have previously absorbed the information that Toni was safe, but it was only now that she could see and feel her that she let herself feel the fierce rush of relief.  
After a moment she could look over Toni's shoulder and take in the others; the twins pale and frightened, hunched wordlessly together; Kirsty sitting beside them, trying to radiate calm; and Jan, in a rare display of anxiety, picking apart a polystyrene coffee cup. And a woman she barely knew, sitting beside a teenage girl. Of course - Toni's friend and her mother, thought Nicola dully. But the mother wanted to talk, in obviously embarrassed guilt that she could walk away from this, that it hadn't been herself driving (as it should have been, she said, only there'd been a muddle about her getting away, and Philip had agreed to take them instead). Nicola felt an unwarranted rush of hatred, endured the woman's offers of help, her explanations that she ought to get her daughter safely home only she hadn't liked to leave until Nicola arrived, and did she want her to take Toni home with her? No, cried Toni, hearing the last bit, I have to stay here, and dissolved again into tears.  
Nicola was on the verge of simply snarling at the woman, look, just go _away_ , but Jan interposed herself in a tone that allowed no argument, saying, "You're very kind to offer, Mrs Thomas, but really, you need to look after Sarah. The best thing you can do is take her on home. "  
So that was her gone. Kirsty and Jan caught each other's eye and went to fetch another round of vending machine tea for everyone.  
So for a moment it was just the five of them. "Mum," said Ray, passing her his discarded coat. Nicola stared at it blankly, then realised he'd seen her shivering. She was still only wearing the dress she'd been singing in; the filmy, flimsy material had not been designed for the dead hours of a February night. Even the over heated hospital air wasn't penetrating the icy chill that gripped her.  
Then there was nothing to do but wait. After a while they even avoided looking at each other because all they saw was the same helpless look in each other's eyes.  
Time passed, every minute seeming to stretch into hours. Eventually a nurse appeared."Mrs Scott? Could you come through?" She looked at all the pairs of eyes fixed anxiously on her, and added, "Maybe one other?"  
Jan and Alex exchanged glances, and Alex stood up and followed them.  
A doctor met them, weary-eyed and briskly practical. "We'll let you see him through the window, but we're still keeping him under constant observation." The words piled up, increasingly incomprehensible as Nicola tried to keep control of them. "Extent of his injuries...multiple fractures..severe trauma..most serious ..punctured lung ...internal bleeding ...transfusions....next few hours critical...."  
He wasn't saying what Nicola wanted to hear but couldn't bring herself to ask. Alex asked instead, trying to match the doctor's tone, "What's the prognosis?"  
"There's a number of risks with the injuries he's sustained, and some possible complications but we're monitoring him closely. When we see how he comes through the next twelve hours or so we'll know more." He indicated that they should follow him.  
Nicola had screwed her hands into tight fists, driving her nails into her palms in preparation, but she still needed to bite her lip hard when she saw Philip.He looked so frail and broken and still, attached to the tubes and machines that were keeping him alive. She would barely have known it was him, the side of his face that they could see was puffed and unrecognisable with swollen bruising. It was only his feet, sticking out of the end of the bed, which she recognised as being him. The doctor went in to speak to the nurse who was watching the machines, and Alex murmured to Nicola, "Did you understand everything he was saying?"  
She might have chided him for being patronising, but glancing at his face, she swallowed her words. He was just trying to find a way of being useful, to gain some control over his own sense of helplessness. So she said, "He never said what he actually meant,did he?"  
"He means all the injuries on their own are manageable, but the body can't cope with so much at once. It's in danger of ...." He frowned suddenly and stopped.  
The doctor came back and walked with them to the waiting area. "Mrs Scott, if I could advise you? We'll be keeping him unconscious for the time being. There's nothing you can do here, so I suggest at least some of you go home and get some rest. You'll be of much more use to him in the next few days." He gave them the briefest of worn-out smiles. It was the closest he had come to saying something encouraging and Nicola grasped at it as the faintest of straws.

After that, back to the waiting limbo.  
"Nicola," said Jan. "Toni needs to go home and be put to bed. By _you_.The others too. I'll stay here." She was quite firm. Nicola, nodded, recognising the need for Jan’s suggestion, and relieved to have something concrete to do.  
Kirsty drove them home, a short journey on the empty roads. The dogs, anxious after their long wait in the empty house, were at the door to greet them, and were delightedly astonished to find Nicola in the returning party. At their simple joyous welcome Nicola felt overwhelmed by the need to cry, and had to bury her fingers in the thick, curly fur of Pun’s neck to steady herself. With an effort she swallowed the hard, hot lump of tears that was burning in the back of her throat, and managed to focus on what needed to be done. The dogs, sensing that there was something wrong about this homecoming, curled up in their ‘out of the way’ places and watched with worried eyes.  
Kirsty took over the kitchen with calm efficiency, heating soup, and milk for cocoa.  
Nicola had been given a mild sleeping medicine for Toni which she mixed into a mug of hot milk. Toni followed her upstairs, pale and unusually compliant. Unresisting, she let Nicola help her out of her clothes and put her to bed, where she sat obediently drinking her milk.  
With a long sigh, she handed back the empty mug and slid down beneath the covers.  
"Mum," she said. "After ... after it happened, he was trying to say something. I ... I couldn't tell what it was."  
Nicola said soothingly, "He was probably trying to ask you if you were hurt."  
A forlorn tear appeared at the corner of Toni’s eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. Nicola bent and gently stroked her hair, as she had when she was a little girl. Her eyelids closed, then opened again.  
"There was so much blood, Mum," she whispered at last.  
Nicola slid off her chair, and knelt close to the bed, so she could put an arm round her daughter. "They're giving him more blood. They can give him as much as he needs," she said.  
Seeming reassured, Toni nodded drowsily, and fell asleep, having handed over to her mother two images which would never leave her head.

When she was sure Toni was really asleep, Nicola dimmed the light and trod softly out of the room.  
She put her head into Ray's room and found it empty. Both boys were in Francis's room, twinnishly drawing together for comfort. She told them to at least try and get some sleep. "It's morning," Francis pointed out. He was right, a pale grey late winter dawn was lightening the sky outside the window. She pulled the curtains against it. "I'll ask Kirsty to drive you back once you've all had some rest."  
She met Alex coming along the corridor.  
"I have to go back to the hospital," she told him.  
"Let me drive you," he offered.  
"No. I need you here. Look after Toni when she wakes up. Make sure she has some breakfast and then you can drive her back to the hospital."  
"Alright. Let me make you a coffee first, then. While you change."  
She supposed that Alex was right and she ought to change. But entering their room she found it full of Philip's recent presence. Traces of aftershave in the air, a discarded t-shirt thrown on the pillow, the sheets that he'd slept on. She hadn't been here. It struck her that he might never be here again.  
She wrenched off her dress and hurriedly pulled on jeans and jumper, leaving the room behind her.  
Kirsty was one step ahead of her. She'd dug out an old picnic basket and filled it with flasks of soup and cocoa. She added packets of sandwiches as Nicola gulped her coffee. Alex rolled up some blankets and squashed them in a bag. They were all being so efficient, thought Nicola. It was unusual for her to be the one watching other people organise things.  
It was something of a relief then, to be finally on her own, driving with more than usual concentration as the early morning traffic built up, threading her slow way through the everyday commuters on the ring road.  
Miranda had arrived while she had been gone, also with a basket of provisions. Between them, they made a rather odd breakfast. She ate because they told her to, absently dunking one of Miranda's croissants into the thermos mug of soup, and swallowing it without taste or interest.  
After that, they wedged the blankets round themselves, more for comfort than warmth, and there was nothing else to do but wait. She closed her eyes, but unsleeping, time passed uneasily. Looking up, she saw that Jan had fallen asleep with her head on Miranda's shoulder, Miranda's arm unobtrusively around her. A parallel memory struck Nicola; Philip sleeping with his head on her shoulder in just the same way, on the back seat of a tour bus somewhere, probably years ago. She muttered an excuse to Miranda and escaped the hospital. She stood in the cheerless expanse of the car park, checking the messages on her phone. A text from Lawrie, on tour with her theatre company in the Far East; _'Crossing all my fingers xxxxx’_.  
If only, she thought, there was a _Them_ that she could bargain with, as Lawrie used to in their childhood. If he lives, she thought, I’ll …. and then couldn’t think of anything big enough to bargain for a life. She checked herself with the same irritation that she used to feel with Lawrie, as if the universe could arrange things to suit one Nicola Scott while all the billions of other people in the world were getting on with living and dying.  
Somewhere around midday, Kirsty and the boys returned, followed in the early afternoon by Alex and Toni. Toni was composed after her long sleep, but admitted to being stiff and aching.  
Two policemen came to talk to Toni, and Nicola sat with her while she recounted what she remembered. The other driver had been an uninsured teenager, driving a 'borrowed' car. It seemed unlikely that he would survive to be prosecuted, one of the policemen confided to Nicola. She supposed she ought to feel something about that, as the boys and Toni did, stirring and muttering with a sort of grim satisfaction, but she felt only an odd blankness.  
They were allowed to see Philip for a few minutes every hour or so. The updates they were given suggested that no change was good, that his condition was 'stable'.  
They were racked with waiting. Nicola found her eyes closing with weariness, only to jerk awake at the sound of footsteps. She sat flanked by the twins, but they were restless and couldn't settle. They kept wandering off, bringing her back snacks from the vending machines, which she forced herself to eat to please them. Eventually she suggested that they go back to the house, along with Miranda and Jan.  
The hospital lights dimmed to the artificial half-light of nighttime. Toni had curled up on one of the benches with a blanket pulled so far over her head that only a glimmer of blonde hair showed, Alex had fallen asleep where he sat. Nicola, aching with tired wakefulness, paced up and down the corridor. A doctor on duty met her, and curtly sympathetic, told her that she might now sit with Philip.  
She sat on his left side, on a chair that the nurse pushed close to the bed for her. Slightly self-conscious, as the nurse came in and out, checking the drips and machines, she took his hand. There was a sort of cage arrangement over his right side, holding the sheet off his injuries. She wondered if she should really be wanting him to wake up. Perhaps it would be better to stay in this drugged sleep and let the pain happen somewhere out of consciousness.  
Finally with a faintly encouraging nod, the nurse left them alone.  
His hand had never felt so immobile. He had subtle, sensitive fingers, always responsive. Musician’s hands. She thought of the way his fingers crooked around the neck of his guitar, the way the strings answered to his hand. How many times had she seen him play the first few bars of a song and then, as an answering echo, the audience's roar of recognition.  
She threaded her fingers through his, longing for an answering squeeze. _Squeeze hard when it hurts._ He'd said that to her once, more than once actually. And so she had, leaving a line of faint purple half-moons in his palm. That was with Alex the first time. Later with Toni, although it had got easier by then. He'd missed the twins. Her own fault really, because Alex had been two weeks late, and she'd insisted that it would be fine for him to be away playing those concerts. But the twins, impatient and restless even then, had come two weeks early. Philip had got the message as he came off stage and been shoved into a car. He'd arrived just as it was all over. It was one of the rare times that she'd ever wept in her adult life, as tears of exhaustion and relief starred in her eyes. I'm so sorry, he'd said, distraught, I should have been here. But then the midwife had given him the bundled twins to hold ….  
She thought of the twins as they'd been earlier, so white and pale and scared, unnaturally quiet. You need to be here now, she told him silently, and repeated it like a mantra. Be here now. Be here now. Be here now.  
She must have nodded and dozed. She heard the nurse return, then leave again. Even the constant hospital noises seemed distant in the deepest hours of the night.  
She started awake again, a firm footstep making her aware of someone else in the room and turning to look, she was surprised to see that it was Ann.  
“How are _you_ here?” she asked, her thoughts woolly and slow with worry and the lack of sleep.  
“I was on my way home when I heard, so of course I had to come.” Ann half-stooped beside her, and Nicola felt a light touch on her arm, a brief, cool gesture. Then Ann stood beside her looking down at Philip on the bed with a detached, professional eye. Nicola dimly wondered how Ann had even got in, as the intensive care area had been rather well policed during the day, but Ann was in uniform and so obviously a nurse.  
“Don’t be afraid, Nick,” Ann said at last. “It’s not his time to go yet. He knows you’re all here waiting for him.”  
In the usual way of things, Nicola might have snapped at Ann to ask her how she could possibly know that. But glancing up at her, she saw Ann’s face was utterly confident and serene, and she felt fear lift away.  
She kept quiet, listening only to the faint hum and hiss of machines, while Ann kept watch with her. After a moment she realised from Ann’s distant expression that she must be praying. In the past that would have made her twitch with an embarrassed urge to look away, but at this moment she was aware of feeling only grateful.  
She held Philip’s hand in hers as if it was an anchor to stop him drifting away, and waiting for the answering pressure of his fingers, felt sleep like a tide roll over her again.  
She came awake with a jolt, and finding Ann no longer there, was looking round for her, when she heard again the slight sound that she must have heard through her sleep.  
“Phil,” she tried to say, but her voice only came out as a croak. Her lips were stiff and gluey with sleep and her tongue felt as if it was stuck to the roof of her mouth.. “Philip,” she managed, trying again, because through puffy and bruised eyelids, his eyes were open and fixed on her in puzzlement, as if wondering what they both did there.

Philip drifted for the rest of the day, in and out of consciousness. He stayed awake while Nicola fetched Toni and Alex. Toni, stiff from sleeping on the bench in the waiting area, squeaked when Nicola told her she could come and see Philip.  
“Don’t go and cry all over him,” Alex told her gruffly - to hide his own momentary wateriness, Nicola suspected.  
“I’m not a total idiot,” Toni hissed back.  
Philip could barely say anything, but fixed his eyes searchingly on Toni, who in turn could say almost nothing beyond “Dad!”  
Seeming reassured, he closed his eyes and slept again.

All was as it should be, according to the nurse who briefed them. They were happy with Philip’s progress so far. Jan and Miranda returning early with the twins, persuaded the three of them to go home, get some rest, let the others do the day shift.

Nicola wandered round her home, seeing it with unfamiliar eyes. The dogs were pleased to see her come home again, but their welcome was muted, made anxious by the distracted comings and goings of the previous day.  
Kirsty had made up a sofa bed, as she often did when they were away, rather than staying out of earshot in her own ground floor flat. Nicola would have liked to sleep on it herself, rather than the empty bed in their own room, but telling herself that would be ridiculous, made herself go upstairs. She had to pack a bag for Philip. Music mainly, a player and earphones. Then she lay down in the big bed, not expecting to sleep, and surprised herself by waking up several hours later.  
She had showered and dressed, and was making herself a coffee in the kitchen when the phone rang. Kirsty had been manning the phone most of the day, telling concerned friends what news she could. Only their closest friends were supposed to know this number, but it was surprising how many of them there were, and how much it had been ringing. But this time it was Trennels.

Alex walked into the kitchen as she put the handset down. “Mum? What is it?” he asked, and then urgently, “ Mum, sit _down!_ ”  
She sat obediently at a stool at the kitchen counter. “I wasn’t going to faint!” she said, indignantly, but it was true that the corners of the room had gone very dark and swimmy. Maybe that _was_ what it felt like to be about to faint.  
“Mum, what is it? Was it the hospital?” Alex was staring at her with frightened eyes.  
“No,” she said, pleased that her voice seemed to be coming out quite calmly. “No, it’s your Aunt Ann. I’m afraid she’s been killed in an accident.”  
If he was relieved, he was very good at not showing it. “Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry.” His concern was genuine but only for her. For him, Ann was a distant figure, an aunt who had gone out to Africa before he was born, a dutiful name in Christmas and birthday cards As a small boy, he had briefly met her as she passed through London on one of her rare visits to either Trennels, or more often, Ginty’s home in Northern Ireland.  
Nicola recounted what Peter had told her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said. ‘It’s rotten timing for you.’  
‘But she was on her way to visit you,’ Nicola had said confusedly, and Peter, assuming she wasn’t taking anything in, had patiently repeated what he’d been told. Ann worked at a remote hospital funded by a small Christian charity. A call had been sent out for volunteers to temporarily transfer to a refugee camp which was spreading in size with non-existent medical facilities. Of course, Ann had offered to go. The tiny plane in which they travelled had taken off, filled with valuable medical supplies, but having left the dirt runway behind and gained the sky; stuttered and failed to fly.


	6. Veined With Gold. (Part Two.)

There was a family debate over what to do with the remains of Ann’s body; but Nicola didn’t hear about it at the time. ‘We thought you had enough to worry about,’ confessed Karen much later. Giles had suggested that they try and bring the body home to be buried in the Marlow family plot at the church in Westbridge. She was still a Marlow, he said, and Pam seemed to be swayed by the idea of bringing her daughter home. But Ginty, consulted at Karen’s suggestion, because after all she had known Ann best, was shocked at the idea. She was sure that Ann would have wanted to be buried in the simple graveyard attached to the hospital, among the people with whom and for whom she had worked for the better half of her life. ‘That’s where she belonged in the end,’ said Karen. ‘They were devastated. We had some lovely letters from the doctors and nurses there.’ And she added sadly, ‘I don’t think our family belongs in the air, do you? When you think what the Marlows have survived at sea….’

She didn’t tell Philip about Ann’s death for another week, by which time he was on a ward, and mostly awake and wanting conversation. Visitors came, so many at times, that Nicola didn’t get to talk to him alone until the last few minutes of the evening before they were all firmly ushered out. And by then, she could tell him simply and briskly that it would be quite hypocritical of her to claim inconsolable grief over Ann - that they had barely seen each other over the last twenty years and had not been close before that. At which he eyed her rather doubtfully, but didn’t press her. But later, as she kissed him goodbye before leaving, he said, “I wish you didn’t have to go.”  
“I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”  
“That’s not what I meant.” He held onto her with his good arm. “I miss you.”  
That wasn’t a thing they usually said. Not with all the necessary absences built into their lives. But neither of them had ever been left like this, lying wakeful through the hollow hours of the night, alone and uncomfortable in a hospital bed from which they couldn’t move.  
“I know,” she said.  
“I’m sorry about Ann,” he said. “Are you alright really?”  
“I’m fine,” she said firmly. “Don’t worry about me at all.”  
And, had she known, left him not only unconvinced, but quite unable to do anything about it.

 

The flow of life gradually filtered back into a new sort of normality. Alex went back to Cambridge and they didn’t see him again until the Easter vacation. Nicola’s days came to revolve around hospital visits. The first non-family visitors to be let in were Dai and Robyn, who came rather surprisingly together, having been more or less amicably separated for some years. “He’s been creeping back up on me,” explained Robyn, grinning, when Nicola enquired. ”Then it all got a bit emotional, you know - when this happened.”  
Spring came slowly. Though whether the winter really was longer and colder that year, or whether it was simply that she was ground down by the dreariness of the twice daily slog through the traffic on the ring road to get to the hospital and the endless, empty nights alone in the bed, the longing for the feeling of sunshine on her face was the same.  
Or the times, when after a sleepless night, Philip was distant and grouchy with her, but managed to rouse himself to be affable and good humoured for a visitor of little importance, a casual friend, someone from the record company.  
To be fair, he knew when he’d done this. Rising to leave once, when she thought he’d fallen asleep, he stirred and caught at her hand.  
“I’ll be back later,” she said.  
“I’m sorry, Nick. It’s not being much fun.”  
“I know,” she said, suddenly and contrarily annoyed with herself for having minded.

It was to be a while before he would be allowed home. He could go once he could manage a wheelchair, they said, but the injuries to his arm and upper body left him weak. Crutches would be impossible for some time.  
Lawrie was still away on tour, but Andrew came on her behalf. Without fuss, he set to building temporary ramps so they could get a wheelchair round the house; it being the type of old house to have steps between rooms and floors uneven with age.

Francis, Ray and Toni were absorbed in their own lives. Nicola picked them up from school every day and drove them to the hospital to visit Philip, for necessarily brief visits fitted between homework - the boys were working surprisingly hard towards their A levels - rugby training and all their other teenage pursuits. For them, the ‘might have been’ had become the ‘thing that never happened’; for Nicola it was still the ‘thing that could have happened’.  
She worried doubtfully about Toni who vanished for long walks on her own, and returned silent and abstracted.. At the same age she herself had loathed well-meaning adults, even if it was only her mother, asking her if she was alright. But then Toni was a strange, alien creature to her much of the time. She found a moment when they were alone, and asked, somewhat tentatively, how she was doing; and was secretly amused to be rebuffed. “Why wouldn’t I be fine? _I’m_ not the one who’s stuck in hospital.” But then, having snapped rather, she seemed to relent.”It’s just that everything I’ve ever tried to write seems so rubbish now. I’m trying to make something - better.” She spent hours shut up alone in their studio, reworking her ideas for songs. But Nicola wasn’t encouraged to come and listen. "They’re not right yet," Toni said simply when pressed.  
Still uneasy, she mentioned it to Philip, who seemed unconcerned. “She’ll be putting it all into the songs,” he said, but promised to talk to her anyway. “I’m sure she’s fine,” he added obliquely. “She lets things out when she needs to.”

As it fell out, he was allowed to come home the week before his birthday. Miranda and Jan came down for the weekend. Miranda presented him with a box, which he opened to reveal a Japanese pot, broken and mended in several places with veins of gold. She started to explain it, but Philip stopped her. “It’s alright, I get it,” he said amused. “You can take your lecturer’s hat off.”  
“Jan keeps telling me that too,” Miranda admitted wryly. She had been invited to be an occasional visiting lecturer at St Martin’s, which had led to a couple of minor guest spots on a Radio Four arts show.  
“She’s been enjoying it a bit too much,” Jan told them, teasing Miranda, but with affectionate pride evident in her voice.

Philip was going to have to go back into hospital for at least one, possibly two more operations on his knee, which had been badly smashed in the accident, and was still lingeringly painful. As his arm recovered strength, he started to manage with crutches. But it wasn’t easy. Nicola learned to recognise the measuring look in his eyes which calculated just how much pain it was going to cost to cover any distance, and stopped suggesting unnecessary trips. Just getting down the garden path to sit in a sunny spot in the garden could be enough.  
Once Philip was home, and a date set for the next operation on his leg, her own agent had suggested it was time to think about rebooking all her cancelled concert dates. But she felt reluctant to commit to them. It was, she supposed, an unreasoning fear that she shouldn’t be giving into, but she couldn’t help it. Philip had prodded her to do something about it, and unable to come up with an acceptable reason why she shouldn’t, she had agreed to look at some provisional dates. She was opening her post now, as they sat in the late spring sunshine, and as she unfolded what turned out to be a list of possible dates, she felt a gloomy sense of dread. She shoved the paper back into its envelope. She didn’t want to go, and she wasn’t going to think about it yet. Not now, not on this first really hot day of the year, not with Philip beside her, eyes closed peacefully, close enough that she could stretch out and touch him whenever she wanted. And as if aware of her gaze on him, he turned sleepily towards her, and squinting in the sunlight, asked her what she was thinking.

It had been a relief when Philip came home and he and Toni could spend some time together. Coming across the garden with the dogs the previous night, she had seen them through the french windows, sat in silhouette with guitars on their laps, and felt a nostalgic wistfulness, recalling the times she had sat with her own father, maps spread out before them in the library, learning navigation. But she was surprised when she asked Philip now what he’d been teaching Toni.  
“Nothing,” he said. “She can’t decide which A levels to go for and she was using me as a sounding board. As if I’d know,” he added, quickly, before Nicola could say it first.  
“Her A levels?” asked Nicola in surprise. They had argued themselves to a standstill about this over the last year as Toni had said repeatedly that she wasn’t going to stay at school, that everyone knew that she was going to be a singer and she was going to get started as soon as she could leave school. Philip had been implicitly on her side, but Nicola had been worried about how the music industry would treat a very striking sixteen year old girl.  
“She’s come to the realisation that she needs more time to learn about things …. “ He grinned at Nicola’s astonishment. “She says if she starts now, before she’s really worked out her own ideas, people will just think she’s doing it because she’s ‘our’ daughter and we’re pulling strings for her.” Which had been one of Nicola’s unvoiced reservations and she was pleased that Toni had thought it through for herself.  
“So which ones,” mused Nicola, guessing. “Drama, I suppose, French, and English?”  
“Them, and something she calls Philosophy and Ethics.”  
“Blimey,” said Nicola in wonderment.  
“I don’t know why you’re surprised. It’s your brains she’s got,” said Philip.

 

Nicola was awake again in the night, as she so often was now. She could have switched on her tiny booklight and carried on with reading ‘Emma’ but she had been finding it hard to concentrate on any book, even favourite rereads.  
Instead she lay restlessly still, until she became aware that the silence in the other bed was the silence of someone else awake.  
They had a special sort of inclining hospital bed set up in one of the ground floor rooms for Philip to sleep in; and to save him from insisting that he could get up the stairs, she was using a sofa bed in the same room.  
“Phil?” she whispered, testing, and when he answered, she sat up.  
“Do you need that cushion sorting?” They propped a cushion under his knee in bed, to try and make him more comfortable, but it slipped out when he stirred.  
“No.”  
“Another pill?”  
He paused fractionally, then sighed, “No.”  
Nicola lay back, resignedly aware that for the first time in her life she had become a fusser; which wasn’t a helpful reflection because it cast her straight back into the restless thoughts that were stopping her sleeping.  
“Nick?” he asked, after a moment in which they both lay alone with their thoughts.”What is it?”  
“What’s what?”  
He didn’t immediately answer. When he did, he said, “Could you possibly come here?”  
She sat up again. “What is it?”  
“No. I mean, come and get in here with me.”  
“I don’t think those beds are designed for two.”  
“I wasn’t suggesting any vigorous bouncing,” he said, in a tired sounding voice. “Just, I would like to be in bed, with you. And not in those bloody pyjamas.”  
“These pyjamas are historic, you know.” They were too, veterans of midnight hours spent sitting up with sick children, early morning garden visits with house-training puppies, and late night phone calls when Philip was away touring, sitting chilly by the land line in the days before mobiles.  
“Yes, well, I’m feeling fairly historic myself at the moment,” he said.  
Removing the offending pyjamas, she slid very carefully in beside him, on his good side. They fitted together neatly, neither of them taking up much room. Not as much room as they should, she thought. What slight thickening middle-age had lent to Philip’s lean frame had gone, not being enough to last days turning into weeks and now months of firstly not being able, and then not wanting, to eat much. Cautiously she eased herself into the curves of his body.  
“Put your leg there....instead of that pillow..there. That’s much more comfortable. And warmer.”  
“You were cold?”  
“Not now, I’m not,” he said. They lay contentedly silent and she was thinking that they might just fall asleep like this, when he said at last, “Now will you tell me?”  
She raised her head slightly, tilting her chin so that she could see the gleam of his eyes in the darkness, just inches away on the pillow. She felt rather tricked. He knew that when they were wrapped together in darkness, skin touching skin, that it was quite impossible for her to hold things back. She felt a sudden weakening, a surge of relief at feeling all the living, breathing pulse and beat of him against her. “Oh, Phil.”  
He waited, silent and patient and listening, so she told him. All about Ann. All the things that should have niggled her about that visit in the hospital and hadn’t till afterwards - when she’d _known_. The nurse’s uniform Ann was wearing, different to the real ones she’d been seeing all day, crisper and cleaner, almost glowing. Ann’s face, clear, bright, recollected. Ann’s diaries and sketchbooks had been sent home to Trennels along with some recent photos. She’d spent years in a hot, dusty climate; in the photos her face showed the lines of experience and good humour but also sadness. But Nicola had seen her as she remembered her in her youth, before she’d gone out to Africa, youthful, radiant with a quiet joy.  
“Do you suppose I was dreaming?” she asked Philip.  
“I don’t know,” he answered.  
“I must have been. I must have been asleep. But why _that_ dream _then?_ ”  
“Maybe she was trying to say goodbye. Reaching out, before she went?”  
“Why to me then? It should have been Ginty.”  
“Because you were the one who needed her?”  
She remembered the calm reassurance of Ann’s touch on her hand, and couldn’t answer.  
He said, quietly, “Whatever it was, I don’t think it’s something to be afraid of.”  
She hesitated, because there was no answer that wouldn’t collide with the truth - that she _was_ afraid. Afraid of what had so nearly happened, afraid of the constant reminders - the newly healed scars on his torso, the way he winced when he moved but tried not to let her see, But most of all she was afraid of the hard ball of tears that pushed at the back of her eyes. She’d been carrying them around unshed for weeks now, getting heavier and more insistent all the time. Even now, just thinking about it, she could feel a rogue tear at the corner of her eye and tipped her head defiantly away.  
“Nick?”  
Impossible to remove herself, not with the weight of his damaged leg on hers. She couldn’t pull away without hurting him.  
“ _Nick,_ ” he said again, and it was no use, she had to give in. She buried her face in his neck. He didn’t say anything, just shifted rather awkwardly so that he could bring his arm all the way round her and stroke the back of her hair.  
She couldn’t have said who she was crying for; whether it was for him, or for herself, for Ann, for the tears at the heart of life. After a long time she felt empty, and then was aware of being held, being comforted.  
She felt his lips against her hair, then gently kissing her. For a long time there was nothing to say.  
Then he said, “I’m going to be alright, you know.”  
“I know.”  
“We have to keep going.” He paused. They were whispering close. She could feel his words on her skin as much as hear them. "We could go and visit your sister's hospital, if you wanted."  
"I don't know."  
"Or we could give them some songs." He meant the royalties.  
"Yes."  
“I think you should start singing again. And get those concert dates planned..”  
“I don’t want to,” she said, which she knew was a weak answer. She felt weak and drained, but it wasn’t an entirely bad feeling. It was more like the feeling at the turning point of a minor illness, when the worst is over, and one is aware of strength slowly returning.  
“I was thinking, by the autumn, if you wanted, I could come with you.”  
Oh, she thought, much struck and suddenly hopeful. “Would you play for me?”  
“Would you like me too?”  
“Oh _yes_.”  
“Then I will,” he said, sounding pleased.  
“It’ll be just like the good old days,” he added. “Remember when one of us was doing a gig, and then we’d stay in some hotel, and you’d keep me awake all night.”  
_“I_ kept _you_ awake all night?”  
She felt, rather than saw, his smile, and on a surge of affection said something entirely foolish. To which he responded in kind, and there they were again, entwined in the night, exchanging soft nonsenses, as if they’d never grown up.  
But because after all, they had grown up, eventually Nicola crept back to the sofa bed, because Philip couldn’t pretend any longer that he didn’t really need to stretch out. But the words that they shared in the kind press of night-time, which might not always get said in the broad light of day, stayed with them, stashed away like a secret hoard, to be treasured and guarded within, as a source of endless consolation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AF apparently told someone that Ann was going to go out to Africa and die young, so her death is at least fractionally canon. In my story she is 51/52 so maybe not as young as AF imagined it.  
> The 'tears at the heart of life' is apparently a loose alternative to the 'tears of things', from sunt lacrimae rerum, although I'm not a Latin expert, so am willing to be corrected if wrong.


End file.
